Maude the Fraud

The Conservatives' capacity for scoring own goals knows no limits. With a double digit lead in the polls, one might have thought that our MPs would be all pulling in the same direction, working tirelessly to propel the party back to power. Not so Francis Maude. 

Yet again, in today's Daily Telegraph, he repeats the falsehood that the last two elections were lost simply because the Tories promised tax cuts and therefore the electoral calculation is simple: promising tax cuts = inevitable electoral defeat. Putting aside the fact that Maude missed out mentioning the tax cuts promised in 1997 (which are also blamed on the party's landslide defeat that year too), the very notion that a promise of tax cuts per se renders the Tories unelectable is the most arrant piece of dishonest nonsense. One wonders how Maude can sit on the Tory benches. He was, after all, elected time after time on a manifesto where tax cuts were promised and I seem to remember they were popular in 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992. The reason tax cut promises didn't work in 1997, 2001 or 2005 is that, as Lynton Crosby said, you cannot fatten a calf on market day. 

What makes Maude's hamfisted intervention worse is that it comes at the very time that poll after poll shows that voters recognize, albeit perhaps belatedly, that their taxes are too high and that the government is wasting taxpayers' money. So much for modernising and being on the side of the voters. So much for social justice: if you want to do something socially just, cut the taxes of the power by increasing the nil rate band to, say, £10,000. While this would benefit everyone who pays income tax, it would be of particularly benefit to the most poor. A socially just tax cut. 

Maude is showing that he is nothing more than an egotistical hypocrite. If he believed so much in the notion of women or ethnic minorities entering parliament, he should stand aside in Horsham and allow such a candidate to be selected in his stead. If he is repulsed as much as he seems to be by Tory activists, their beliefs and the values of those millions of people who will vote Tory come what may, maybe he should go elsewhere and ply his trade. If he believes we should pay more tax, he should send in a cheque to HM Paymaster General and I be they will cash it!

The success of Project Cameron - and the reason many of us on the so-called free-market right are happier now than we were last summer - is that the offering to voters and party activists is more balanced than it was a year ago. I do not doubt that much of the sometimes painful process of modernisation advocated in Cameron's first year as leader was necessary to decontaminate the Tory brand and to ensure that the voters would actually listen to what the party had to say - rather than simply refusing to listen to what Maude's ally, Theresa May, said was "the nasty party". 

But as I said in a well-received piece on Conservative Home last October, a key lesson for the party after it had narrowly avoided the catastrophe of an early election last autumn was for the leadership to avoid picking needless fights with the party's activists or the free-marketeers in the party. Given that the principal reason the party recovered in the polls during the party conference in October was because of the party's explicit promises to cut stamp duty and inheritance tax, one wonders how Maude could have got it so wrong yet again. In fact, one wonders whether his real goal is to destabilize the current leadership in the hope that he and his allies can try once again to capture the party's leadership so they can take their self-styled modernization programme even further. 

Francis Maude is anything but a modernizer or a radical. He is not showing leadership. He is trying to learn the lessons of defeat in 1997 and to apply them to 2008. That is a foolish as trying to campaign in 1997 on a manifesto that was right in 1986. 

By choosing this moment to pick a fight with the free-marketeers in the party, he has picked the wrong moment. Only the most pig-headed, out-of-touch and conceited fool would now deny that voters want their taxes reduced. It must be nice to know you will receive a fat cat pension, paid for by the taxpayer, when you do finally leave the House of Commons. But for millions of us, the current economic situation is desperate. We are heavily overtaxed, over-regulated and over-governed. 

If Francis Maude honestly cannot see that to be the case, then perhaps the members of Horsham Conservative Association need to persuade him to do so - or they should find a real Tory to stand in his stead at the next election, instead of being represented by someone who sees his sole goal in politics to appease the BBC and The Guardian and who has long ago given up the fight.