From '˜heir to Blair' to '˜I was the future once' - Cameron's legacy

HE ONCE described himself as the '˜heir to Blair' and there are strong parallels between the trajectory of David Cameron's political career and his Labour predecessor.
David Cameron's time in office began with a good-humoured press conference with then Deputy prime Minister Nick CleggDavid Cameron's time in office began with a good-humoured press conference with then Deputy prime Minister Nick Clegg
David Cameron's time in office began with a good-humoured press conference with then Deputy prime Minister Nick Clegg

Both were elected as party leaders at a relatively young age, represented a significant change of course for their parties and challenged their traditional supporters to ditch long held positions in a bid to appeal to the broader electorate.

In their exits from Downing Street there are comparisons to be made too as both were eventually undone by matters on the international stage.

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The fallout out of the Iraq war contributed heavily to the demise of Mr Blair while for Mr Cameron the refusal of the British people to listen to his pleas to remain in the European Union brought his premiership to an end.

And in both cases, the respective prime ministers had confidently embarked on a course of action against warnings of calamity from colleagues that would prove to have disastrous consequences for their careers.

But there the parallels end.

Mr Blair left Downing Street after more than a decade in office .

Iraq has come to define the Blair era but it is often overlooked that even in 2005, two years after Britain invaded, he earned his third election victory and a Commons majority of 66.

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At the time, the result was presented as a chastening one for Mr Blair given his previous triumphs but it was a margin of victory of which Mr Cameron could only ever dream.

In that decade in office, Mr Blair’s governments carried out a radical shake-up of education, breaking the link between schools and local authorities with the first introduction of academies and started a major programme of school rebuilding.

In health too, billions were pumped into bricks and mortar while new NHS trusts were publicly held to account for their performance against strict targets.

Whether this scale of public spending or the target-driven approach was desireable or achieved the necessary ends remains a matter of debate but, Iraq aside, the radical shake-up of public infrastructure and delivery defined Blair’s time in the top job.

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The Cameron legacy is tougher to discern for the simple reason that for five of his six years in Government every policy was negotiated with the Conservatives’ Liberal Democrat partners.

The nature of this uneasy partnership and the fallout from the financial crisis almost inevitably led to Mr Cameron’s first term as Prime Minister taking on a managerial character.

His personal influence was clearest on the issues where he took the Conservatives in a dramatically different direction from the past.

He led more than 100 Conservative MPs to vote for same-sex marriage just over a decade after 71 MPs from the same party had tried to block the repeal of the notorious Section 28 rule which banned councils from doing anything to “promote homosexuality”.

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Mr Cameron also ring-fenced funding for international aid as his Government cut huge sums from other areas of public spending.

His outright victory just 13 months ago gave him the opportunity to set an agenda for five years which would define his prime ministerial legacy before his self-imposed time limit of the 2020 general election.

In his Conservative Party conference speech last year he gave a guide to the direction he wanted to take armed with his own majority, promising to “live up to the greatest traditions of Conservative social reform”.

In many ways it was a return to the “modern compassionate conservatism” he had called for a decade earlier as he became party leader but which had been subsequently sidetracked in the aftermath of the credit crunch and the compromises of coalition government.

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Speaking in Manchester last October, Mr Cameron told the party faithful: “I’m starting the second half of my time in this job.”

In the event, he had just eight months left in Downing Street following a single event which, as with Mr Blair, will define his legacy.