January 04, 2009	Sunday	Muharram 06, 1430

Will 2009 be the year in which David Cameron finally “seals the deal” with the British electorate? After Gordon Brown’s remarkable recovery in the polls towards the end of 2008, Tory nerves became decidedly jittery, especially during the autumn financial and economic crises. Opinion polls saw stratospheric ratings for the Tories during the summer melt away – for Labour to end the year between just four and seven points adrift in most polls in December.

But of all the party leaders to be optimistic about the New Year, Mr Cameron still has most to smile about. Not that the state of a party’s fortunes at the beginning of a year is necessarily much of a guide as to where they will be 12 months later. My own predictions in this space a year ago anticipated a disaster for the economy to the extent that I rashly speculated that the Chancellor, Alastair Darling, would no longer be in his post by the year’s end. Yet the worse the nation’s finances deteriorated, the more secure Mr Darling’s position became.

The Prime Minister’s Churchillian appeal to the nation that he is a latter day wartime leader of the nation in crisis has, however, only a limited appeal once the Tories can – as they surely will – establish in the minds of voters that Mr Brown caused much of the trouble in the first place.

The Tories lost the initial skirmishes when Mr Brown successfully blamed all economic woes on the pesky Americans. They fell into his trap by initially accepting the “worldwide” nature of the crisis by stupidly signing up to the “let’s all pull together” theory of politics, only to suffer from Mr Brown’s portrayal of them as the “do nothing party” once they realised the error of their approach.For a few voters, however, the pain of the depression – this is more than a recession – has still to be felt. Indeed, for those still in work benefiting from falling tracker mortgages and lower food and fuel prices, there will continue to be a “feel-good” factor as their standard of living increases.

But if most economic predictions are right – a huge “but” after the hopeless forecasts of a year ago – the pain of unemployment will outweigh any minority “feel-good” factor. Since few, under the age of 40, will have known anything like the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s recessions, this will be the first economic downturn where a sizeable proportion of the population has any collective memory of bad economic times. And even those baby boomers like myself, so used to regular booms and busts in previous decades, will find the economic onslaught that is about to engulf us beyond anything we have previously experienced.

Against such a background it is hard to see how Mr Cameron can fail to make significant progress during the coming year. Two crucial mid-term electoral tests give him huge opportunities to consolidate the gains he made in London and local councils last year. For the first time since 1993, county council elections will be held in England NOT on the same day as the general election.

In 1997, 2001 and 2005 these local elections coincided with Tony Blair’s three victories on general election turnouts – saving hundreds of Labour-held county council seats. This year those seats will be defended on low turnouts ranging from 35 to 40 per cent, resulting in an overwhelming clean sweep for the Tories.

Similarly, on the same day in June, the European elections will also be held. Again, the Tories are poised for massive gains thanks to the implosion of the UK Independence Party that clocked up over 2.7 million votes in 2004 which translated into 12 seats in the European Parliament. These should easily fall to the Tories, making for dramatic headlines about the extent of the Tory revival. In the end, what gives an opposition its greatest traction is not its position in the opinion polls but its ability to win real votes at the ballot box.

Last May’s local election triumphs gave Mr Cameron’s party the springboard for their subsequent victory in Crewe and Nantwich. Both the local election results and this parliamentary by-election similarly caused the panic among Labour MPs who could translate ward losses in their own constituencies into defeats for themselves.

Of course Labour strategists may just persuade the Prime Minister to cut and run early in May. The G20 summit, which he will be hosting in London, on April 2, with all the attendant ballyhoo surrounding his photo opportunity with the new US President Obama, lends itself to an ideal backdrop for launching a campaign immediately after he has read out the communiqué announcing that he has successfully saved the world.

But Mr Brown has proved that while he may be reckless, he is no risk-taker. Certainly the pre-budget report was designed to allow the option of an early election to still be an option during 2009 but the initial appeal of the twelve billion pounds blown on a temporary VAT reduction seems now to be waning.

The Tories are successfully stumbling into a coherent economic alternative based on the premise that borrowing billions to solve a borrowing crisis will not work. History is on their side, as any observer reading the recently released national archive papers relating to the dying days of the Callaghan government 30 years ago will readily testify.

Even Callaghan eventually presided over an actual cut of five per cent in public expenditure, making it plausible for the hawks in the Tory Party to articulate the inevitability – as well as the efficacy – of real terms cuts in the future.

Speculation continues about an imminent Tory re-shuffle to match the drama of Labour’s recall of Peter Mandelson. The name of Kenneth Clarke continues to excite many Tories but, in the end, time and events rather than personalities will prove Mr Cameron’s greatest assets.

The sands of time are running out for Mr Brown and, if he is still prime minister this time next year, a Cameron victory in 2010 is assured.—Dawn/The Independent News Service