New Statesman - Why are the Tories losing support?

New Statesman - Why are the Tories losing support?

Posted by George Eaton - 01 December 2009 10:43

The Sun, Ukip and rising economic confidence damage the party

Cameron's decision to abandon a Lisbon referendum has lost the Tories support. Photograph: Getty Images

The new ComRes poll showing support for the Conservatives falling again is likely to have led to some anxiety at CCHQ this morning. Seven out of the last ten polls have put the Tories below the psychologically crucial figure of 40 per cent. Today's poll is the third in just over a week to show figures that, if repeated at the election, would produce a hung parliament.
The Tories will comfort themselves with the weekend YouGov poll that gave them a 6 point lead over Labour in 32 key northern marginals. The fear remains that the millions Lord Ashcroft has pumped into marginal seats will ensure that in practice David Cameron wins a working majority.
Despite this, the decline in Tory support is still explicit enough to encourage those who have long argued that Cameron should adopt a more populist, right-wing agenda. Over at PoliticalBetting, Mike Smithson notes that the Tories have started to lose support to Ukip in the wake of Cameron's decision to abandon a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.
ConservativeHome's Tim Montgomerie suggests that the fall in support has less to do with the party's new position on Europe and more to do with the breach of trust that Cameron's decision to abandon his "cast-iron guarantee" of a referendum represents.
I'd add that the Sun's vulgar campaign against Gordon Brown damaged the Tories by association and that rising confidence means the economy isn't quite the political headache it was for Labour.
The biggest danger for the Tory leadership is that the party's persistent decline in support will undermine its policy agenda. George Osborne's "age of austerity" was predicated on the assumption that the Tories would win a large majority at the next election, providing them with the parliamentary support necessary to push through unpopular spending cuts and tax rises.
This is a major test of Cameron and Osborne's resilience.

David Cameron shows his murky side in official portrait - Times Online

David Cameron shows his murky side in official portrait - Times Online: "
Richard Brooks Arts Editor
      Portrait of Tory leader David Cameron by Jonathan Yeo, 2009, oil on canvas, 42"x72".

THE first official portrait of David Cameron shows him in gloomy colours rather than as a bright, bold figure to lead the country out of the Gordon Brown years. The portrait, commissioned for the Conservatives, is also remarkable for its depiction of a party leader, let alone a man banging on the door of No 10, standing in an open-necked shirt with both hands in his pockets.
“It’s a deliberately murky-coloured background from which he is emerging,” said the artist Jonathan Yeo. “We still don’t know much about Cameron as he is coming into our lives as a comparative unknown.”
Cameron, who became party leader four years ago, is usually regarded as an attractive family man who is slick on presentation.
Yeo, whose past portraits have included the Duke of Edinburgh, George W Bush, whom he deliberately insulted with a montage including porn, and Tony Blair, said:
“I was trying to capture a different sort of politician — one from my generation which has a look of informality and a bit of the rebellious sixth former.”
The artist, who has also painted portraits of Nicole Kidman, the actress, and Erin O’Connor, the model, was initially approached by a Tory donor, the businessman Andrew Sells, to paint Cameron. The portrait was to be auctioned in aid of the party, but now a significant percentage will go to Tickets for Troops, which gives injured British servicemen free entry to sports and music events.
Cameron went to Yeo’s west London studio five times over the past 18 months for sittings. The artist, who is the son of the former Tory minister Tim Yeo, was also allowed to follow the party leader around as well as sit in on some meetings.
Initially Yeo sketched a portrait of Cameron sitting down, but the Tory leader did not like it. According to Yeo, he was quite chatty as a sitter, discussing “sometimes politics, sometimes the music I was playing in the studio. And, of course, we did briefly discuss the death of his son earlier this year”.
Cameron last viewed the portrait a few months ago when it was near completion. “He seemed to like it,” said Yeo. However, his wife, Samantha, who studied art at university, has not yet seen it.
Spouses often have very strong views about the portraits of their other halves. Lady Churchill so hated the portrait of her husband Winston by Graham Sutherland that she burnt it; while Cherie Blair vetoed a planned portrait of her husband for the National Portrait Gallery because she disliked the proposed artist, Nicola Hicks."