Tories try to regain footing amid Labor’s popularity boost

For much of the last year, Britain’s ruling Labor Party has been on the run. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair had worn out his welcome. The new leader, Gordon Brown, was seen as boring, morose and too old-style liberal.

The man to beat was David Cameron, the young sharp-witted Conservative Party leader. No more.

Maybe it’s the new prime minister’s honeymoon, maybe, as many analysts say, the British are ready to go back to boring and safe after 10 years of silver-tongued Blair. Whatever the case, Britain’s Conservatives opened their annual conference here Sunday 7 points behind Labor in the latest polls, struggling to recover their balance and wondering where the glory went.

As Brown huddled with his lieutenants over the weekend pondering whether to call a snap general election to capitalize on Labor’s popularity boost, Conservative leaders were retooling their agenda, urging a return to traditional Tory values, calling for aid to first-time home buyers and rethinking some of their “green” tax proposals.

“This week we’re going to make the great Conservative fight back,” Cameron declared at the conference opening at this down-at-the-heels seaside resort in northwestern England.

Former Conservative leader William Hague sneered at Brown’s recent meeting with former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at 10 Downing Street and had the conference hall thundering with cheers.

“Could it be the same man who said the Thatcher government had failed to prepare our economy for the 1990s, who said the free market had failed, that we should nationalize multinationals . . . and fought tooth and nail against every one of Lady Thatcher’s vital reforms?” Hague said.

“You may fawn now at the feet of our greatest prime minister,” he said, “but you are no Margaret Thatcher.”

Since taking the helm in June, Brown has weathered several crises, including an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in cattle, which was rapidly contained; an attack on Scotland’s Glasgow international airport; and a bank run on the mortgage lender Northern Rock, which eased within days when the government stepped in.

A poll released Sunday by Ipsos Mori, sponsored by the Observer newspaper, found that 60% of voters surveyed think Brown is best able to manage a crisis, compared with 13% for Cameron.

The poll showed Labor with a 7-point lead over the Tories, 41% to 34%; other polls have shown the lead as high as 11 points.

The corollary of the “Brown bounce,” as pollsters are calling it, is the “Dave dive.” Cameron, 40, is facing not only disaffection among the voters but anger among his party faithful, many of whom have been suspicious of his attempts to freshen the party.

The result has been growing resentment among traditional party voters angry over issues including immigration and education, willing to vote against Labor but not finding solutions in the Conservative Party, either.

Cameron’s aim has been to modernize the party by moving it toward the center in the same way that Blair and Brown fashioned New Labor a decade ago.

But there have been catcalls in the ranks over his support for mainstream education and same-sex unions. Several “green” tax proposals -- taxing people who park at supermarkets, for example, or those who take more than one short flight a year -- have also raised hackles. Cameron has responded that he is “addressing the issues that matter to people today.”

“We became the party of the environment and well-being. . . ,” he said. “It meant understanding the real priorities of people today, so we put economic stability before upfront tax cuts.”

Brown, meanwhile, seems to have picked up a few things from the Conservative playbook. Laborites at their conference last week talked about security and patriotism, ending teenage binge drinking and deporting criminal immigrants. Brown also appealed to traditional Labor voters with a proposal for increasing maternity pay.

“These three months make us more optimistic about what we the British people at our best can do,” Brown said of his crisis-ridden debut at Downing Street. “Our response was calm and measured. We simply got on with the job. Britain has been tested, and not found wanting. This is who we are.”

The Tories tapped as conference speakers two U.S. Republicans who have also tried to build bridges between traditional notions of liberalism and conservatism, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who spoke via satellite, and New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who gave Sunday’s keynote address.

“By being a strong and forceful voice on climate change, David Cameron has revived your Conservative Party’s green heritage and helped strengthen Britain’s resolve to set an example on this issue,” Schwarzenegger said. “That is the kind of leadership people are hungry for. They want action and results, not ideology and stalemate. They prefer progress with messy compromise, over defeat with pristine principles.”

On the Conservative benches, there is dissension over Cameron’s sharp discipline against party dissidents and an attitude toward his colleagues often seen as intellectual snobbery.

“Today we have a deeply unpopular leader of a junta within the party who’s never really made any substantive progress,” said a Conservative lawmaker, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Much rests on whether Cameron will be able to pull off the rousing, party-uniting kind of conference speech that preceded his selection as party leader in 2005, and whether Brown decides, most likely after seeing the outcome of the Tory conference, to rush to the polls next month or wait until 2009 or 2010, when his bounce may be history.

What’s still unclear, political analysts say, is whether Brown’s new popularity has legs.

“One of the things to remember about David Cameron is he’s a very professional public relations person, and one of the things really professional public relations people do is when the wind is against you, they don’t spit into it,” said Tony Travers, a political scientist at the London School of Economics.

“It looks as if Cameron is taking a deliberate decision to let this [Brown bounce] happen to some degree, and see what comes at the end of it,” he said.

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kim.murphy@latimes.com