Big Bruce Anderson….even his options have options

Cameron is surrounding himself with the yes-and-no-with-reservations process gobbledygook brigade. They are messing up what should be a simple Tory message.

Whenever I talk to the few Westminster Tories I know, two names come up again and again as being major influences upon David Cameron: Steve Hilton and Bruce Anderson.

Hilton is the younger of the two men, and carries as his baggage the description ‘marketing guru’. After 35 years in advertising, research and marketing strategy, I think the term to be an oxymoron. Marketing is essentially a simple process in which two things matter above all others – the brand idea, and the detail of fast footwork in distribution. In such an environment, one needs lots of precise people and a few very creative people – and both are equally vital. Gurus are for colleges, not real-life marketing.

I was given an email from Steve Hilton of late – not to me, and not (I hasten to add) secret. It read like something Lord Birt might have written. This is not a compliment.

Considering he’s supposed to be the strategic brain, Hilton didn’t read Page One on joining Cameron’s small gang. The first page should have been what the best thinkers were discussing at the time: what will happen when people see through Brown, and his never-ending boom goes bang-a-bang? Hilton and others thought that there was a broad Brownite consensus that was accepted by the public on levels of public spending and taxation. So ever since the Crash, they’ve been clueless.

Acceptance of what ‘is’ was the same Machiavellian, brainless assumption Blair, Mandelson and Gould made about Thatcherism; and the lack of any creative economic ideas remains the great big yawning gap in the Hilton approach. After the most monumental fisco-economic bust in history, it’s not so much a gap as a fatal flaw. When it comes to educating Dave about the way to tackle the passing of credit-driven capitalism, Steve is going to be as much use as Katie Price on QI.

So if Cameron could turn now to an older head for a straight answer, it would be A Good Thing.

Bruce Anderson is not that man. He writes like a cross between a civil servant and an indecisive conveyancing clerk. This is a recent effort on the deficit:

‘….the deficit is far too high and must be reduced. On the other hand, economic activity must be maintained. To some extent, we will have to grow our way out of the deficit. That would not be possible if there were an economic implosion caused by over-hasty reductions in government spending’.

Err…right, we’ll do that. I think. Taking his stick to agitate more of the stream’s mud, Bruce offers this gem of single-minded clarity on the subject of What Is To Be Done about the national finances:

‘…who is right, and whom will the markets believe? We will only find that out with the passage of time….The markets are nervous. Though they will not necessarily want quick action, they will want a guarantee of decisive action…In order to prevent deflation and a depression, it was necessary to throw money at the economy. But will it be possible to manage a recovery without that money turning into inflation? How quickly will it be safe to bring an end to quantitative easing and restore interest rates to normal levels, in time to curtail inflation without aborting the recovery? Again, no one knows, and there is an exciting range of possibilities…’

You know, I doubt very much if Cameron wants to explore that exciting range just at the moment. And I’d bet a pound to be piece of doo-doo that the Tory leader doesn’t want to go for a quick, decisively nervous deflationary chucking of dosh at things in a potentially inflationary manner. I suspect he just wants to know what the fuck to do.

Business is full of people like these: referring to sign-posts on roadmaps and explaining how fundamentally complex everything is, they always wind up (like Gordon Brown himself) thinking everything to death until the deadly lockjaw of analysis paralysis has finally been reached. Not only do they not have any ideas, they are terrified of ideas. The latter Anderson piece above is chiefly funny in the way it ends meekly with ‘nobody knows’. Famous adland legend Frank Lowe was fond of asking at this point, “Well can somebody find out, please?”

Such ‘advisers’ would rather describe than decide. For them, the words ‘nobody knows’ are the signal for an orderly and honourable retreat from the answer.

Add to this mix the spectre of Matthew Parris muttering ‘wisely’ in the background “Let’s just not say anything”, and you can quite easily blow a ten-point lead in the polls – which is exactly what the wise-assed Cameroons have just done.

I hear the knives are out for Hilton: he is, the backbenchers grumble, a bit of a diagrams and coloured-pencils merchant…possibly even ‘a twat’, although to be fair that was just one comment. Still, he does write like Lord Birt, who is an especially refined form of twat.

Either way, this is no time for theses. As The Slog pointed out earler today, lenders, hedgies, Fitches, currency traders and Chinese persons are looking for an unequivocal sign that we British can tell the sky from the vase on the cupboard over there. There is only one we can give if we are to avoid something to make Greece a minor cash-flow problem by comparison: a recognition that we are an unsafe bet, and thus the order of becoming safe will be (1) cutting costs dramatically and (2) reconfiguring our industrial base + agriculture. In that order. Not the other way round.

This would have two immediate impacts. First, calmed credit nerves. And second, a large ocean of reality between the Tories, and New Lilliput on the other side of the House.

The job then would be to convince the British they’re being lied to, and that heap painful medicine now is the only way to avoid quadruplegic amputation later.

Over to you, Mr Cameron.