The Blair-Bush partnership, so awkward for the Labour party, has come to an end and everyone is speculating about how Gordon Brown will recalibrate the Special Relationship. But what about the Tories? Marginalised for years by Tony Blair’s diagonal alliance with the Republican President, they have struggled to know who their real friends are in Washington. This is a chance for them to think again.
Instead of allowing Gordon to go creeping back to the ascendant Democrats, leaving the Tories to make peace with a shattered Republican party, this could be the moment to admit that during those years of opposition the Tories and the Democrats have become rather well suited. If David Cameron wants a change-defining gesture that is coherent and actually popular, why not put an end to the existing formal ties with the Republican party and ask Hillary Clinton out to dinner before Gordon Brown gets anywhere near her?
Some Conservatives have long preferred the Democrats. Alan Duncan and Simon Burns, respectively shadow trade and industry secretary and whip, both told me that they have been Democratic sympathisers for years; Nick Boles, putative Conservative candidate for mayor of London, is positively lyrical about Barack Obama. But theirs is a minority voice, dwarfed by an overwhelming instinct that the Tory partners in the United States must be the Republicans because, well, that’s just the way it is.
In fact, a centrist Democrat such as Hillary Clinton has more in common with Cameron’s Tories than any Republican. In choosing Clinton as the example I should declare an interest — I worked in her Senate office when I left university in 2003 and remain a fan — but as the Democratic Debate last Sunday showed, Hillary in particular is bearing the brunt of a major conundrum that David Cameron shares: having voted for the Iraq war, how do you criticise it in opposition? This may have started as an accident but it has developed into a fundamental sympathy of outlook. Both have recently given major foreign pol-icy speeches, and although they opt for different language (Cameron chooses ‘liberal conservatism’, Clinton ‘realistic idealism’) they offer the same principles, prioritised in the same order: first, a reassurance that they are prepared to use military force when appropriate; second, an absolute rejection of the neoconservative project; third, an emphasis on multilateralism in any future endeavours. Gordon Brown is too tied to Iraq to claim anything like the same degree of common ground.
Even in domestic policy, on a whole range of issues — women’s rights, the importance of the family, investing in state education, ending cronyism and the culture of spin in government — Hillary Clinton sounds remarkably like David Cameron. She is a free-marketeer, but one who recognises what Cameron calls ‘our moral obligation to the people and the places left behind by globalisation’. If anything, her emphasis is more conservative than Cameron’s — no new Tory would dare suggest anything as fragmented and privatised as Hillary’s new plan for universal healthcare coverage, and she has developed the habit of quoting Ronald Reagan on the need for fiscal conservatism and a balanced budget.
The echo goes right down to tone and emphasis. Here are a few of Senator Clinton’s recent soundbites: ‘It is totally unacceptable in a modern, civilised society for there to be a pay gap between men and women doing equivalent work. It is morally wrong’; ‘Childcare is not just an issue — it’s the issue’; ‘I believe passionately that we’re all in this together: that we have a shared responsibility for our shared future.’
I’m sorry, did I say Senator Clinton? My mistake. Those were all recent quotes from David Cameron. This is what Hillary says: ‘It is not right that at the beginning of the 21st century women still earn significantly less money than men for doing the same jobs’; ‘Childcare is the single biggest issue for working families today’; ‘I believe in individual responsibility but also in strong communities. I believe that we are safer and stronger when we work together.’ Hillary Clinton, it appears, is the New Tory candidate.
At this point, old-fashioned British Conservatives will argue that the coalition of wacky neocons and Christian evangelicals that has dominated the Grand Old Party since the Clinton administration is finally breaking up, and that sensible Republicans — the natural allies of the Tories — will return to prominence. This certainly appears to have been the thinking of David Cameron, who invited John McCain (a moderate Republican) to speak at last year’s Conservative party conference. But look what a mistake that was. Since the conference, McCain’s support for Bush’s troop surge has not only taken a sledgehammer to his poll ratings, but even led him to talk about a ‘clear divergence’ with British Conservatives. The Tory MP Andrew Tyrie now even singles out McCain as an example of a presidential candidate it would be ‘hard-going to work with’. It seems that even the most progressive Republican will end up with more points of disagreement with British Tories than an equivalent Democrat. As for the invitation of Arnold Schwarzenegger to this year’s Conservative party conference, it begs the question: if the only guy you want to associate with is the most famously un-Republican Republican in America, might it not be time to admit that you are looking in the wrong party?
Speaking to William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, reinforces the impression that the leadership’s hands are tied by a range of sensitivities and historic loyalties. On the one hand he cites a number of Democratic officials he met recently in Washington; he tried to meet Barack Obama (‘scheduling difficulties’, apparently) and would like to meet Hillary Clinton and generally ‘get to know the Democrats much better in the future’. But on one thing he is quite clear: ‘the Republicans are and will remain our sister party. You do not end a relationship with a party established over decades just because they may be unpopular or because of differences of policy.’
But what better reasons can there be? Might not the ‘sister party’ arrangement with his opponents help explain Senator Obama’s ‘scheduling difficulties’? Just because some senior Tories have decades-old relationships in the Republican party, why should there be a formal relationship?
It wouldn’t take much. Liam Fox would not need to wind down his ‘Atlantic Bridge’ operation or stop fostering links with Washington Republicans; Michael Gove could carry on publishing neoconservative handbooks. All it would take would be for David Cameron to go to Washington, meet Hillary Clinton and other leading Democrats as well as George Bush, and issue a short statement: ‘Due to the importance of maintaining the Special Relationship whichever parties are in power, the Conservative party will not pick sides or have partisan arrangements with any particular political party in the United States.’ Point made.
Overseas alliances, as David Cameron argued when he pledged to take the Tories out of the European People’s Party, are not insignificant to a political party; they provide a measuring-stick against which to define its identity. The Democrats in the US represent the centre-ground, and it would be a mistake for the Tories to surrender it to Gordon Brown for sentimental reasons. Oh and also, they happen to be ahead in the polls.