They're Cutting To Shape

Britain's young guns are trying to remake politics in their image

By Catherine Mayer Monday, Nov. 08, 2010
    • DAVID BEBBER / AFP / GETTY IMAGES

    Cleggeron The similarities between the Prime Minister (left) and his deputy are more conspicuous than the differences

    (2 of 2)

    Two years later, signs of growth — and the Argentine invasion of the Falklands — rescued her government, and she went on to win two more elections, but she also endowed the Conservatives with a reputation for brutality that Cameron has worked hard to shed. He has a vision of a Big Society (but not a Big State) that will shelter the weakest and poorest, and he appears to take pride in Britain's taxpayer-funded national health system. All that, plus his decision to enter a coalition with the caring, sharing Lib Dems, should have dashed any lingering suspicions that he might be a crypto-Thatcherite. Then came the cuts.

    Many at home and abroad saw in their scale and scope a Thatcherite fervor for rolling back the state. The program is expected to lead to the loss of some half a million jobs in the public sector — and more among those private enterprises that do business with it. Though Britain's economy grew by more in the third quarter of the year than many analysts had expected, at 0.8% the expansion is hardly anything to crow about. Yet the critics who see nothing but a younger Thatcher in Cameron, and revivified Thatcherism in his government's policies, are missing key differences too. If you look closely, the cuts reflect some impulses far removed from Thatcher's.

    The decision to shield the health budget from the ax might be seen as a ploy to please voters — though both Cameron and Clegg have relied on the state-funded health service to care for their children. But the protection of Britain's overseas-aid budget, coupled with a commitment to honor the old Labour government's pledge to spend 0.7% of GDP on aid by 2013, cannot be so interpreted. Both the British military and the police are having to get used to the idea of living with less — there will be aircraft carriers but no airplanes to fly off them until 2019. That has enraged traditional Conservative supporters. "It is a national disgrace that we cannot defend the Falkland Islands that so many men died for and must rely instead on charity for our allies," commented one reader of the right-wing, mass-market Daily Mail . "I knew as soon as the Lib Dems got involved what this coalition would turn into."

    The Metropolitan Males
    It's turning into something interesting. From the moment the coalition was formed, commentators quickly looked beyond its ideological fault lines to what its members had in common, including the evident affinities between Cameron and Clegg. Both have easy, demotic manners, boyish looks, privileged backgrounds and socially liberal, metropolitan outlooks — a collection of attributes, if you like, that is more likely to smile kindly on overseas aid than to give the police and armed forces everything they want.

    The pair swiftly acquired a joint nickname: Cleggeron. Miliband — educated at Oxford, as were Cameron and Osborne (Clegg was at Cambridge) — shares many Cleggeronian traits, including an attachment to an independently minded woman. Cameron's wife was until recently the creative director at a luxury-goods business and is now a consultant there; Clegg's is a top-flight lawyer; Osborne's, an author. Miliband has attracted criticism in fustian corners of the media for not having married his girlfriend, an environment lawyer who is expecting their second child in November. They will eventually tie the knot, he says, "but there are stable families that aren't married."

    If such Cleggeronian attitudes have the power to upset traditionalists, a glimpse behind the scenes of government would leave them spluttering. The Conservative and Lib Dem machines have melded seamlessly, working to promote a project that Cameron sometimes calls Liberal Conservatism. Backbenchers of both parties are queasy at seeing their brands and beliefs diluted. There are no such reservations in Downing Street. "The mood is good. We get on better than either side expected," says one Cameron aide. "We of course share the government agenda, the coalition agenda, but we also go off and do our separate Nick Clegg and David Cameron things, and there's never any tension, never any suspicion. I never think, I wish I had my own office," says the aide's opposite number, a Lib Dem. "It's very fluid. We overhear everything others say. We're in and out of each other's conversation. It's very civil. It's a great working atmosphere — one of the most surprising, most pleasant experiences of the whole coalition."

    Aides are in accord on the source of their accord: it flows from Cameron and Clegg. Neither man is given to shouting or standing on ceremony. Both are not only comfortable in the presence of women but have given key roles to them. Downing Street is surprisingly feminized — surprising because much of the rest of the political system, and a mass-market media that smirkingly uses the phrases "Cameron cuties" and "Mili's fillies," has yet to witness any such effect. "I've come across other politicians who think they're very modern and relaxed with women, and they're not. There's always a subtext: Isn't it weird you're a woman?" says a Clegg aide, implying that her boss is different.

    Still, some things in Britain haven't yet changed. TIME's conversation with MP Stella Creasy was interrupted by another new female MP asking for "sisterly advice" after a Tory peer took it upon himself to criticize her (unexceptional) mode of dress. To secure a slot for her maiden speech, Creasy was forced to wait for seven hours without food or drink in the Commons chamber. Outside Westminster and its quirky rules, meanwhile, the government is going to have to convince all sorts of British institutions that do not like to change that they will have to — from universities expected to raise more money from their students and alumni and less from the state, to generals and admirals whose memories of a glorious past for Britain's armed forces are having to be retired along with their battle honors. And the government is already discovering that what seems to be straightforward often is not. Plans to slash hundreds of advisory bodies funded by the government have been scaled back because of the expense, and headache, of unwinding them; Britain's navy got to keep its new aircraft carriers, despite the lack of planes to fly from them, because it would have cost more to break the contract.

    All that said, the unusually large intake of new MPs is explained above all by the sense among voters that their old institutions had let them down. Can Britain's new generation of leaders not just join the system but beat it? We'll see.

    This article originally appeared in the November 8, 2010 issue of TIME.

    3. 1
    4. 2
    5. Next Page