They’re off — but what are the party leaders trying to tell us?

Big three: Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg must convince the public
12 April 2012

It took Gordon Brown precisely 10 seconds at the launch of the General Election to announce that he was an "ordinary middle-class" person.

Stop laughing at the back. Mr Brown's determination to become bog-standard middle class is touching, if rather implausible.

That wasn't the only moment when truth was suspended from the nearest lamppost. The PM's claim to be "one of a team" must have caused inner hilarity among the many ministers grouped around him. In his long years as Chancellor and Prime Minister, Gordon's "teamwork" has been notorious.

Mr Cameron, meanwhile, has acquired a glottal stop to match his wife's — and they didn't teach him that at Eton. These small false notes are part of bigger deceptions. The risk of this election is that already disenchanted voters decide it is really just a fib.

Most of the big promises are likely to be eaten away by the necessities of stringency to come. Even Mr Cameron's freezing of National Insurance — a canny pre-emptive swipe which has cost Labour polling points at the start of the campaign — contradicts the Tory leader's core message: that the deficit should be swiftly addressed.

This is a tension that cannot be wished out of existence, even with the aid of prominent business supporters and a truly dreadful Labour poster which managed to make Mr Cameron look desirable as a rakish reincarnation of Gene Hunt in Life on Mars.

Truly, I love election knockabout as much as the next obsessive but my hunch is that voters are tired of Tory boys in suits coming up with posters knocking Gordon Brown as lacking egalitarian credentials, or Labour nerds twittering Cameron obscurely about the Seventies.

We do get that it is more serious than that. So save the ad agency fees and tell it to us straight. Mr Cameron needs to drive home that his vision of change is beneficial to the whole of middle Britain, not just upper middle-class professionals who are more likely to be enticed by his promises of the "post-bureaucratic state".

If you need a politics degree to decipher the meaning of key phrases, the phrases just aren't right. "I do think," one key Cameronian mused to me, "that we have difficulty saying what we mean."

It's hard to find language that puts across that a Tory government wants to shift responsibility away from the state while supporting smaller groups in society who can diagnose and address problems more effectively than the state. "By the time we've explained all that, Labour's come along and said, Vote for us and we'll put more computers in your schools'."

His problem is that Cameron still sounds as if he is addressing a meeting. He very rarely sounds — like Blair, Clinton or Obama — as if he is speaking directly to each one of us.

Luckily for Mr Cameron, Labour is offering a very unenticing package indeed: higher taxes from this week for the successful, a frankly dull leader, and a Cabinet whose new generation really wish that Gordon would leave the stage.

Even the PM's rallying cry, "Let's go to it", sounded stilted. Who speaks like that: is there a phrasebook just for Gordon?

The visuals yesterday told their own story: Mr Brown was out and about for most of the day as a lone figure, adroit, energetic and devoid of much of a link to the rest of his party. He badly needs to get rid of the accusation that ambition and a sense of entitlement alone drive him to seek the crown.

Naturally, politicians seek power — it's what they do, however adept they are at sounding as if they are doing it for everyone else.

So here was Mr Cameron's Agincourt speech on the South Bank: "Let's win it for the mother/the pensioner/the soldier. Let's win it for all of them."

Very closely related, that one, to Obama's recent plea for his healthcare bill: "Don't do it for me. Don't do it for the Democratic Party. Do it for the American people."

But the parties can only advance so far by tending to their target groups with soundbites. What the campaign needs is a big argument which sparks the imagination of voters.

So far, the party leaders have looked and sounded exactly as we expected them to do: which is why the great British public is less absorbed by the rolling news than the networks assume.

They remain in their safety zone: they need to lock horns and take risks in the TV debates — and on the road. Nick Clegg (also out and about with his "office wife", Vince Cable) must drop the tone of weariness: Nick, it's only day two.

Spontaneity, we know, isn't Gordon's forte. The decision to parade his Cabinet is not really about a team at all. It is about the view that a continuation of a Labour government may prove a more reliable and imaginable thought for insecure lower Middle England than a still diffuse Tory message.

But four weeks is a long time to preach "More of the same". There is barely a truly new idea in New Labour, from academies to NHS reforms, that Mr Brown has not squashed or watered down over the years.

The Government thus goes to the electorate with no coherent public-service reform plan, and only a late outbreak of John Lewis-style "mutualism" as its big idea. Its vision is as impenetrable to most of us as Mr Cameron and his post-bureaucratic Wotsit.

Time and tide dictate that this should be David Cameron's election. Four years after he inherited the leadership of the Conservative Party, he has his best chance of seizing back power for his party — yet he has so far failed to give a compelling account of why this should happen.

Complete this sentence. "Britain will be better under the Tories because"

If we're still stuck for a memorable reply four weeks from today, they don't deserve to win.

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