Bourne: I want us to make a difference

Mar 2 2008 by Matt Withers, Wales On Sunday

As party members gathered in Llandudno this weekend, Welsh Conservative leader Nick Bourne told MATT WITHERS there’s still plenty of work to be done if David Cameron’s policies are to become reality...

CONSERVATIVE leader David Cameron visited Wales this weekend with his party in good heart.

His appearance at the party’s Llandudno conference is his eighth visit in the last year. Conservative spin doctors like to compare this with the fact that Gordon Brown only made his first trip last month.

And the Tories have had a pretty good year.

They’re now the official opposition in the Assembly after their election performance last year. It’s little wonder Mr Cameron, whose gran was from Wales and who counts Cerys Matthews among his friends, prefers visiting here to other parts of the UK.

Welsh Conservative leader Nick Bourne said: “I joked with him on this. He said ‘It’s always good to come to Wales’.

“I said ‘And I know what the next line is going to be’. He said ‘What?’ and I said ‘Especially compared to Scotland’.

“He said ‘Well, yes...’”

Mr Bourne, 56, has always been a supporter of Mr Cameron, even when times were rocky for the party.

Now he feels the public at large have come to view the Old Etonian as the next Prime Minister.

Sitting in his Cardiff Bay office, he said: “He’s always been a Prime Minister in my mind.

“I think he probably is much, much more a Prime Ministerial figure after the events of the autumn, because the current Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, blinked, and David Cameron kept his nerve at a time when there was immense pressure on him.

“There were one or two siren voices trying to call him back to the sort of dog whistle politics on issues that may play well with a section of the party but certainly don’t play well with a large part of the electorate that you need to win elections. He resisted all that.

“I think people do see him as the next Prime Minister. I think he is increasingly looking like that.”

Not that Mr Bourne wanted an election last autumn. “I think it’s fair to say that if there had been an election then it would have caught us napping,” he says.

Still, the next election for the Welsh Conservatives to worry about is May’s council polls. The Tories have 112 councillors across Wales – well up from where they were a few years ago – but, Mr Bourne concedes, still very low (they are behind Labour, Plaid, the Lib Dems and independents in numbers).

“I don’t think we’re anywhere near what we could be achieving,” he says.

“We’re under-performing. It’s our weakest area in terms of election results.”

This time around the Conservatives’ key target is the leafy Vale of Glamorgan, although they also hope to pick up council seats in Cardiff and Swansea.

The party currently leads the UK opinion polls and are 11 points clear at the time of writing. But support for the party has ebbed and flowed in recent months, and Mr Bourne knows the Tories need to build up a regular strong lead in the run-up to the next General Election.

“I’m disappointed it’s not more,” he says.

“I mean, clearly we need to be doing a little bit better to win outright at the next election, not least because the electoral system, the way it is at the moment, is stacked against us.

“We do need to be doing better. That’s undoubtedly true in terms of the polling.

“But bear in mind how the party has been transformed under David Cameron. I mean, the Labour Party was not doing particularly well when we were in opposition under Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard, so we have at least made that breakthrough now where we’re consistently in the lead in the polls.

“I think as we unveil policies and the spotlight turns more onto the opposition, we can expect to do better. I think increasingly, as we unveil policies on taxation, on law and order, on giving extra powers to voluntary organisations, which hasn’t happened so far because we haven’t wanted the Labour Party to steal them, like on inheritance tax, then you can expect that lead to increase. But it needs to be higher.”

Perhaps people still don’t know what a Conservative Government would do, though. In many areas policies are still being thrashed out.

It has been said that, while it is possible to picture Mr Cameron’s Shadow Cabinet with ministerial red boxes, we still have no idea what would be in them.

“ I think that the general pattern of what (Shadow Chancellor) George Osborne (right) would do is becoming pretty clear,” says Mr Bourne. “We’re committed to maintaining Labour’s spending plans, we’ve said there’ll be a shift to environmental taxation away from direct taxation, I think that’s fair. We want to make sure that businesses remain competitive.

“I’m not sure that there is any doubt about the thrust of economic policy, there may be on the detail, admittedly, but I think that was ever the case with any incoming government.”

The party “certainly” needs more big policy announcements, like upping the inheritance tax threshold. Mr Bourne says such announcements were “not to be populist, but clearly to catch the mood of the times” – which sounds like a definition of populist, but there you go.

Back in Wales, the leader feels the party is now increasingly seen as Welsh and not, say, south-east English (he is very excited about providing Welsh-language translation facilities at this weekend’s conference in Llandudno).

But he adds: “I’m not sure we have completed that journey.

“I’m looking at it from the internal perspective looking out, but it doesn’t feel like a Home Counties party. We’ve got a second management board, we’ve had separate headquarters in Wales, we’ve got a very strong Assembly group here.

“Have we got more work to do? Yes, I’m sure we have. But look at the candidates, look at the candidates selected for Westminster. I mean, traditionally, many, many more candidates selected for Welsh seats were from England, maybe the Home Counties.

“This time I don’t think we have got a single candidate who is from outside Wales. That’s all the winnable seats plus one or two now beyond that.

“We’ve changed massively, there’s no doubt of that.

“We’ve seized an opportunity. Everyone thought devolution was probably the death throes of the Welsh Conservative Party. We’ve turned all that around. And we had to.

“I think it’s important that we are a Welsh party – after all, we’re representing Wales.”

Are rockier times ahead for the party, though? A referendum on full law-making powers for the Assembly is promised by 2011 and the Conservatives are hardly united on the issue.

Mr Bourne, who was a member of the executive of the ‘Just Say No’ campaign prior to the 1997 referendum is in favour. His MPs, and many of his party, are against.

It’s probably a good thing for them that Welsh Secretary Paul Murphy (below) last week effectively kicked the issue into the long grass by voicing his view that he didn’t think it would go ahead by 2011, although Mr Bourne insists he’d rather get it out of the way.

“There’s a unanimous agreement that if we’re going to have primary powers we’re going to have to have a referendum,” he says.

“We were the first party to say that.

“I think there’s probably a growing consensus that we need to deal with the issue on either side of the argument, whether you want the powers or not.

“And admittedly in the party there are people on both sides of the argument – it’s no good denying that.

“People largely in the Assembly group, probably totally in the Assembly group, favour extra powers. But a lot of the members, and certainly the three Westminster members, I don’t include Cheryl (Shadow Welsh Secretary Cheryl Gillan) in that necessarily, do not want the extra powers.

“But I think we all recognise that’s going to be dealt with by the referendum at some stage. We’re not going to agree on how we should campaign, but that’s probably why the referendum is needed.

“If everybody agreed, then there wouldn’t be any need on a referendum, I suppose.”

There doesn’t need to be a party line, he suggests, raising the possibility of Conservative AMs and MPs taking opposite sides.

“I’ve made it clear. I think we do need additional powers. I think there are some nonsenses here. There are things we can’t do because we haven’t got the powers. We’ve got devolution, we’ve got an Assembly, an enormous amount of time, effort and money has been invested in it.

“I want us to be part of it, I want us to be part of the Government and I want us as part of that Government to have the powers that are needed to make a difference in the areas we’re responsible for.

“The current position is not tenable in the long term. I don’t think there would be any difference between us on that.”

But Mr Bourne thinks rockier rides are in store for his rival parties in the Assembly.

He warns that Plaid risk losing grassroots supporters over issues like not putting up cash for a Welsh-language newspaper. He says such issues will drive a wedge between Plaid ministers and their traditional supporters.

“They’re going to be very comfortable in their limos,” he says. “They all look very comfortable being part of the establishment, but I’m not sure how that’ll play out in the Plaid heartlands of West Wales.”

And he apparently spent the previous evening discussing Labour’s forthcoming leadership battle with an eye on who would be worst for the Tories.

He thinks there will be three candidates: Counsel General Carwyn Jones, Merthyr AM Huw Lewis and one of Finance Minister Andrew Davies and Health Minister Edwina Hart

“Clearly we need to be thinking as to who the successor to Rhodri Morgan is, because that’s the person who’ll be fighting the next Assembly Elections,” he says.

Is there one the Tories particularly fear?

“There is, but I’m not about to say who it is.”

But feared because he or she would be more attractive to Tory voters?

“Yes. And floating voters, or swing voters.”

Speculate among yourselves.

As it is, he admits, he likes current First Minister Rhodri Morgan – as a person.

“I’ve always got on well with Rhodri,” he says. “He’s an engaging politician – an engaging person perhaps more than an engaging politician, really. You can talk to Rhodri on almost any subject you like.”

But despite missing him as a person Mr Bourne says he will not miss Rhodri’s brand of politics.

“I disagree with him fundamentally on his approach. I think he’s outdated and rooted in a sort of post-war creed of ‘this is what the state’s going to provide for you’.”

There’s none of the genuine dislike you feel exists between Gordon Brown and David Cameron. Perhaps this is the surest sign of the all-new, cuddly, touchy-feely Tories. Voters will get their say on how attractive the party has become at the elections in May.