As David Cameron and Ed Miliband move away from the centre, they leave a space for Nick Clegg
David Cameron and Ed Miliband have a problem shared. Both lead parties that doubt their ability to win the next general election. The Tories look at their leader, the man who could not achieve a clean victory over Gordon Brown in 2010, and ask themselves why he should do better in 2015. History says he won't. The last time an incumbent Conservative prime minister increased his share of the vote was in rather special circumstances in 1955.
The crisis of confidence in its leadership is less noisily obvious in Ed Miliband's party, but in a quieter way anxiety is building among Labour people. One member of the shadow cabinet describes Labour's recent performances at the ballot box (a bad fourth at the Eastleigh byelection, an underwhelming first in the county council elections) as "a clarifying moment". There is a sobering analysis of Mr Miliband's electoral chances by the veteran pollster Peter Kellner, a man broadly in sympathy with the party, in the latest edition of Progress magazine. He reminds us that it is very rare for an opposition party to win a parliamentary majority at its first attempt. He also underlines why opinion poll leads around the 10-point mark do not inspire confidence. No opposition has won an election without achieving a poll lead of at least 20% at some stage of the parliament. In a conclusion that should keep the Labour frontbench awake at night, he writes: "No successful opposition in the past 50 years has gone on to regain power with such a weak image and without achieving much bigger voting-intention leads at some point in the parliament."
There are many ways of explaining the mutual failure of Messrs Cameron and Miliband to mobilise a majority behind their respective parties. Today, I'm going to think about it in terms of triangulation. In trigonometry and geometry, triangulation is the method for determining the location of a point by measuring angles to it from known points at either end of a fixed baseline. In politics, it is a way of identifying the location on the political spectrum most likely to win you an election and putting yourself there. Bill Clinton's pollster, Dick Morris, is usually credited with giving the word its political meaning. He is also seen as a pioneer of the technique in which a political contender presents himself as above and equidistant from left and right. It is really a fancy way of saying it places the candidate in the centre ground, which is where most elections are won and lost.
It has been reviled, especially by ideological purists, as cynical and unprincipled. But the technique has a good record of winning. Bill Clinton, who positioned himself between the old left and the new right in America, won two terms and, notwithstanding Monica Lewinsky, he would very likely have secured a third had the US constitution allowed him to run for it. Tony Blair, who positioned himself similarly in Britain, did win three terms, though his party only let him serve out two years of the final one.
Since they retired, the technique has been declared dead. Suggest to David Cameron that he is a triangulator and he would recoil with horror. The prime minister already has enough trouble convincing members of his party that he is really one of them. Tell Ed Miliband that he is a triangulator and he would be equally aghast. He has spent much of his leadership repudiating anything associated with New Labour.
Yet both of them are triangulating, even if they don't want to admit it, or they don't even know it. The difference between them and Bill Clinton and Tony Blair is that they are both going about it the wrong way.
Back in the day when he used to call himself "the heir to Blair", Mr Cameron was not bad at finding the sweet spots on the political spectrum and putting himself there. Not as skilled as the Master, but a reasonably good apprentice. As leader of the opposition, he tried to mirror Mr Blair by triangulating the Tories between the old right and the new left. He was not the left because he would run the economy better, but he was not the old right either because he was forcing Tories to embrace social change. His new Conservatism would combine the traditional Tory claim to be the party of economic competence with a more compassionate, socially progressive, green and internationalist outlook. Oh, and I am sure I remember him promising that they would stop banging on about Europe. The blend was not sufficient to win a parliamentary majority for the Tories, but it was just enough to get them into government after 13 years of opposition and that was better than any of his three predecessors had managed.
That project of Tory modernisation was never properly finished in opposition and has unravelled in government. Perhaps it was always bound to be doomed in the context of austerity. Perhaps it was also condemned to fail because Mr Cameron was not vigorous enough about it, too many of his own party never really signed up to it and they now daily demonstrate how much they hate it in ways that leave the prime minister looking embattled and weak.
A recent indicator of that is the Queen's speech. Stripped from it was any legislation that might aggravate the right of the Tory party, including minimum alcohol pricing, anything green and the promise to enshrine the international aid target in law. Up front were measures on immigration, read out to the MPs and peers assembled in the House of Lords by a descendant of German immigrants who is married to a Greek.
This week's parliamentary vote on the coalition's programme will be another illustration of the extent to which the Tory party is sliding rightwards, sucking its leader along in the slipstream. Faced with a motion tabled by rebel backbenchers attacking the lack of legislation on a referendum on Europe, David Cameron's official position is to be "relaxed" about his own MPs voting against his government's Queen's speech. So laid-back is he, it is even suggested that he would be voting with them were he not absent in America. The tactical argument for this advanced by his people is that fighting his rebel MPs would cause more trouble than it is worth. Still, it leaves Mr Cameron looking feeble and blown about.
It also tells us where he is now triangulating. That is to a position roughly equidistant between where he used to be and Ukip. Maybe he and his advisers know something about the British electorate that I do not – maybe they have divined that its centre of gravity has moved decisively to the right – but my instincts and political history tell me that this is not a position on the spectrum where Mr Cameron is going to find a majority.
Ed Miliband is also triangulating. In his case, he has taken the process to a point bewildering even to those with degree-level trigonometry. There were a lot of angles in the speech he gave yesterday lunchtime. He attacked the government, as you'd expect. He also dismissed the idea of Labour being a "protest" party of the left, which was of a piece with his recent rejection of the calls for a general strike from Len McCluskey, the leader of Unite. Then he went on to distance himself from the last government, the one he was a member of, and contended that the political approaches and policy solutions pursued by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were out of date and irrelevant to today's problems. In summary, Mr Miliband is anti-old right, anti-new right, anti-old left and anti-New Labour. That tells us where he is not, but leaves us struggling to see where he is. I guess he'd say "One Nation Labour", but "One Nation" is a label, not a location on the spectrum.
Judged by the arguments he advances and what policy we have seen come out of his Labour party, Mr Miliband has triangulated himself to a position roughly equidistant between McCluskey Labour and New Labour. He may know something about the British electorate that I do not – maybe it has moved as decisively leftwards as he seems to assume – but again my instincts and political history tell me that this is not where he is going to find a majority.
One person for whom this is modestly cheering is Nick Clegg. He is also a triangulator. Though he would not want to say so in public, his strategists are not ashamed to admit to it in private. His triangulation follows the original idea by trying to position himself and his party in the centre ground. The Lib Dem pitch at the next election will be as the party more caring than the Tories and more fiscally responsible than Labour. There could be a market for that formula. Maybe not a huge market, but then the Lib Dems don't need a huge market, just enough of one to keep sufficient MPs to hold the balance if there is another hung parliament. What we know is that most people still identify themselves as belonging to the centre ground and Mr Clegg has a better chance of bagging votes there when his rivals are triangulating themselves away from it.
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