David Cameron's media muddle

As a former PR flak-catcher, David Cameron clearly cares about how he comes across in the media. For most of his tenure as Conservative leader, however, he has proved himself better able than some of his predecessors to harness his hunger for headlines to drive his political strategy in the Tory media. He has also been much more sensitive than they were to the significant section of middle-class voters turned off by talk of tougher sentences and shrinking the state – a sensitivity that must have had something to do with his decision at the weekend to court accusations of confusion in order to modulate the Conservative message on spending cuts . Whether this nuanced approach – based on the idea that the Conservatives can come over as both tough and tender – will survive the tribulations and temptations of the long election campaign is another matter. Howard and IDS had their moments, but it was William Hague who was particularly prone to allowing his advisers' obsession with improving his public image tempt him into populist poses that ultimately did his party more harm than good. True, the media "hits" thereby gained may have helped limit the damage done early on in Hague's tenure, but all victories are relative. It was obviously better for him that, by the end of his time in charge, he was portrayed as a skinhead taxi driver rather than a toddler trapped in his high chair. But it wasn't that much better for a party that needed to remember that its "core vote" was not, in fact, white van man but the increasing proportion of middle-class voters who have passed through university and (through some strange alchemy we don't yet fully understand) absorbed the kind of attitudes more associated with the Guardian than the Daily Mail. This was a sea change reflected last week (and not for the first time) in the latest official survey of British social attitudes . Those who write columns and leaders for the Mail, and the rightwing press, have to be seen not simply as spectators shouting from the sidelines but as "the party in the media". The Conservative commentariat is a completely unlicensed but nonetheless integral part of the party – a force that, under some of Cameron's predecessors, sometimes seems to have had as much, if not more, say on Tory strategy than activists, MPs, CCHQ and the shadow cabinet put together. One of Cameron's biggest achievements is to have rebalanced this relationship, to have reduced the party in the media to its proper place. It's still an important component of the Conservatives – just as, say, the Mirror and the Guardian are an important part of Labour. But it's no longer the be-all and end-all. This is as it should be. Most politicians continue to believe that the media can win or lose them elections. But the academic (as opposed to anecdotal) evidence for this conventional wisdom is, in fact, vanishingly small. The most scholars can safely say is that the media, while it can't tell us what to think, might have some role in telling us what to think about. Given that elections are in part a battle between parties to get "their" issues onto the agenda, rather than those of their opponents, the ability of the media to render some topics more salient than others might have some indirect bearing on the outcome. But it's likely to be a drip-drip effect – an incremental contribution to a climate of opinion that relies on people's lived, as well as their mediated, experiences. Better, of course, if you're a politician to have the media for you rather than against you. But you should never try so hard to please that it causes you to confuse tactics for strategy, to sacrifice a long-term, game-changing repositioning of your party for the sake of a morale-boosting splash in the redtops. That, while it might appease your critics, could prove counterproductive in the long run, if it sends out the wrong message to some of the broadsheet readers you're hoping to win back. This is something David Cameron has so far seemed instinctively to realise. But so, too, once upon a time, did Gordon Brown – a man whose premiership soon turned into a sorry tale of one ill-judged media stunt after another. Yet it is whispered, possibly unfairly, that the Tories' rediscovered enthusiasm for prison ships was floated recently not by Cameron's frontbench justice team but by Andy Coulson, apparently in order to signal that Cameron had not forgotten about law and order amid all the talk of "cutting the deficit but not the NHS" . Of course, it's important for the Conservative leader to modulate his message continually between tough and tender – indeed, it's an axiom of the "and theory" politics of combining tradtional and modernising themes which he espouses that he do so, hence his concern this weekend to reassure voters that he and George Osborne won't overdo the austerity, at least in the short term. It's also difficult to see how the Tories can fail to beat Labour next election, whatever they do. Winning it outright, though, is not yet a done deal. All the more important, then, that Cameron – without whom, the Conservative's 2005 campaign might have ended up being even more small-minded than it was already – keep his eyes on the prize. Cameron's great insight was that grabbing great headlines on traditional Tory issues doesn't always do it for many of the voters needed to win a healthy working majority. More and more of the middle classes are small-l liberals, and a good proportion of them works in or depends on the public sector. His party might not like it, but he can't afford to forget it.