IT would be a bold buccaneer who sought to become Britain's Prime Minister on an anti-change policy. He would also be mad, given that so much is manifestly wrong with the old country.
Having said that, I must confess I find the modern concept of politics utterly exhausting. Everybody, it seems, is in the business of permanent revolution. Some even practise it. Ed Balls, our Education Secretary, leaves schools gasping with his endl
ess stream of recycled initiatives.
Barack Obama flies around in an aircraft daubed with the word "change".
David Miliband tries to kid himself that Labour can win the next election on "a platform of change", as he describes it.
And such is his unworldliness that you can well imagine Gordon Brown going to the country in 2010 promising change after 13 wasted years.
Nick Clegg's agenda for change has already left the Liberal Democrats in a spin. Until recently, they were to the left of Labour. Now they are to the right of the Tories in promising tax cuts of £20bn.
It is not merely exhausting; it is utterly confusing. Who stands for what, if anything, any more?
Which brings me to David Cameron. Now there's a canny lad. He doesn't promise much change. He is so unspecific about what – let alone how – he is going to change things that his core voters still wonder, after two years, what he is about.
They don't like his reticence on tax cuts, but can understand why he is reluctant to commit himself when everyone suspects the public finances are in a right old mess. But they are positively restive over his commitment to match Labour spending on health and education, given the grand scale of both expenditure and waste.
Some of us also suspect that he is not above a bit of duplicity as his minions quietly reassure energy companies that the Tories will, like Labour, back nuclear power, while presenting himself as a fully-paid up cuddly, idealistic – ie deluded – wind, waves, tides and solar Green.
Cameron does not leave us breathless at the prospect of his pace of change any more than does Boris Johnson, our royally-connected Conservative Mayor of London, now that he is installed in City Hall. Boris has not exactly set the Thames alight in his first few months in the glass onion, hard by Tower Bridge. Optimists see him taking things steadily and incrementally.
We certainly need to take the fever out of government. The pre-occupation with lights, camera, music, Press release, propaganda and media manipulation these last 11 years, has been ludicrous.
The system has systematically promised more than it could ever deliver, recycled initiatives at the drop on the doormat of even a hint of policy criticism and been in legislative overdrive simply to give the impression of decisive action.
And Gordon Brown is as big a spinner as ever Tony Blair was. Put another way, they both have a monumental contempt for the ability of ordinary folk to put two and two together and form correct impressions.
Perhaps Cameron, derided as a mere PRO by Brown, recognises the need to take the heat and kidology out of government. If so, we shall all be better off when he steps into No 10. But I like to think there is another factor, which weighs heavily in his caution. That is the state of the Civil Service. In my time in it – 20-40 years ago – it was regarded, not always justifiably, as a Rolls-Royce machine. Now it seems the system can never get anything right, what with porous borders, lost personal data computer discs, tax credit errors by the billion and so on.
Something has gone seriously wrong, whether because of instant spin, Ministerial insecurity and indecision, endless tinkering and paranoia, over-complication, the dominance of wet-behind-the-ears political apparatchiks or politicisation – or a combination of all these things.
No government can change the world without a machine to pull the levers. No such machine can be expected to work if it is constantly having to change tack, adapt to the latest wheeze or is being driven by mad spin doctors. Eventually, it goes phut! It has been phut-phutting all over Whitehall for years.
If Cameron has picked up these signals and recognised them for what they are – a cry for help, repair and proper use – he will get off to a flying start as a Prime Minister. He might even change things for the better – provided he does not promise too much.
Remember, you can't plough a field with a coughing tractor.
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