The Tory Big Brother eviction show

Gordon Brown’s record as an economic manager should go a long way in clawing back any ground lost to the Tories by Labour’s poor handling of the Blair “reform agenda”. Providing Labour do not become irreconcilably split before the leadership handover, Brown has a good chance of regaining the centre-right territory by dint of “owning” the economy as an issue.

The third striking lesson is that voters do not want scary opposition leaders or scary opposition policies. In Australia it was the opposition leader in Mark Latham that frightened rather, perhaps, than his policies. In the UK it was the other way around where the inoffensive Michael Howard was overshadowed by a scare campaign based on Europe, taxes and xenophobia.

Oppositions, too often, ask voters to take a leap of faith in supporting them: there is no way cautious mainstream voters are going to do that. I have written on this factor before in regard to Colin Barnett’s campaign in the Western Australian election, and everything I observed then has been reinforced in the UK.

Which brings me neatly back to Tory big brother. Unlike Australian leadership contests mostly held behind the closed doors of the party room, here the Tories parade the hopefuls at the party’s annual conference, beauty contest style, before members and delegates and in front of an eager media. Each gets to make a speech, then parliamentary members get to vote. The one with the fewest votes is “evicted”, next day there is another round of voting, and so on until there are just two left. Then these two names are put to the general party membership to select the leader - the viewers’ choice, no less. The polls close in mid-December.

I won’t go into the pros and cons of this process, only to say that, for an Australian used to blood-on-the-walls leadership spills, watching this almost disarming and gentlemanly contest made for great nightly tellie. We could cheer on our favourite or jeer at his eviction. Life really has come to imitate art.

I don’t believe it matters too much who wins out of the urbane, affable and thoroughly modern David Cameron or the more right-wing David Davis, what matters is that whoever ends up as leader does not panic. Voters are rarely captured by an opposition sweeping all before it, rather they want a leader who remains sane, stable and capable of handling the economy.

To summarise, the problem facing opposition parties is that incumbent governments have been good at staking out the middle ground and leaving little room for anyone else. This has forced oppositions to veer away from the centre in search of territory they can call their own. In Australia, Labor at the last election pinned their hopes on the left values of environment and education, while in the UK the Tories went for conservative positions on immigration and crime. Come election day, both parties found their positions to be too far from the centre to satisfy enough cautious swinging voters.

Winning elections from opposition requires different tactics than those used by government. The gravitas and authority incumbency brings means that governments can effectively use scare campaigns to frighten voters from straying. But this tactic is not open to oppositions: making the voters jumpy only encourages them to stay where they are.

Opposition leaders must hold their nerve and their line and not be tempted either to maverickism or to idealism. They must sooth and cajole, stay positive and sunny. It may be boring but it is true: the path to government is straight down the centre.