On Monday, hotfoot from the Beckhams’ “Full Length and Fabulous” pre-World Cup party the previous day, to which he had cadged a ticket from the editor of The Sun, David Cameron rolled up at Google’s UK headquarters in Hertfordshire.
The Tory leader may have been a gatecrasher among the footballers, pop stars and assorted celebrities at the Beckhams’ Sawbridgeworth mansion, but he was guest of honour at the Google Zeitgeist Europe 2006 conference.
There he had some flattering words for his hosts, who he said had built “a world-beating business and a world-famous brand in record time”, but he also revealed he had “Googled” himself and feared that interest in him had peaked on December 6, the day he became party leader.
Mainly, though, Cameron wanted to convey a new message. For those who had expected the Tory leader to emphasise his hardnosed commitment to business and the profit motive, and underline his admiration for the protestant work ethic, he treated his audience to a speech that might have made a Liberal Democrat blush.
“Wealth is about so much more than pounds,” he said. “It’s about the beauty of our surroundings, the quality of our culture and above all the strength of our surroundings.”
Providing jobs was all well and good, he added, but they had to be the right kind of jobs. “How can we in Britain master the challenge of providing people with work that adds not just to the quantity of money in their pockets, but the quality of their lives?” he asked.
Then, as if to bury Thatcherism once and for all, he had this to say: “It’s time we admitted there’s more to life than money, and it’s time we focused not on GDP but on GWB — general well-being.”
For many in British business, which has had to put up with a series of digs from the new Tory leader in the six months he has been in the job, the reaction ranged from bemusement to outright hostility. One executive said: “It’s all very well siding with hippies when it comes to green issues but Cameron’s wishy-washy ideas looked pathetic in a business context.”
Allan Leighton, chairman of Royal Mail, said: “The divide between politics and business is becoming ever wider.”
Kelvin Mackenzie, chairman of Media Square, the marketing-services group, and former Sun editor, wrote: “[Cameron’s] policies are dreamed up in the shower and then jotted down on the back of a cigarette packet ... forget about GWB, Mr Cameron and try a bit of LBT (less bloody tax) and LBC (less bloody crime).”
Last week’s speech followed accusations by Cameron that business has been ignoring its wider responsibilities.
WH Smith was lambasted for contributing to children’s obesity by selling half-price Chocolate Oranges at its checkouts. BHS was accused of fuelling the early “sexualisation” of girls by selling padded bras for children. Tesco, the Tory leader suggested, wasn’t always a “good neighbour”.
Were the Conservatives, as they used to claim, still the “party of business”? Or have they suddenly become distinctly anti-business? “David Cameron is trying to out-Blair Blair,” said Sir Digby Jones, director-general of the CBI. “I understand he needs to take his party to a place where it is electable.
“Do I like it when he criticises businesses, as he has been doing? No, I don’t. If he wants to take a cockshy at business for electoral reasons that’s understandable. But I don’t want it doing damage to the image of business, particularly in our schools.”
Neil Goulden, chief executive of Gala Coral, the gaming group, said: “I don’t see any difference nowadays between Tony Blair and David Cameron. I don’t think they are against business, they just don’t understand it. It’s a fairly sad state of affairs.”
So what is going on? Can business learn to love and understand Cameron? And can he, having had a short corporate career himself, succeed in getting on better with business?
GEORGE OSBORNE, shadow chancellor and Cameron’s right-hand man, insists the Tory leader’s business critics have got it wrong. “We are absolutely a pro-market and pro-business party,” he said, and that was why it was vital that the Tories also be a critical friend of business.
“We’re still seen as far too inside the pockets of big business. The fact is businesses need to be responsible and we shouldn’t be shy of saying so.”
Good companies, which look after their employees, customers and shareholders, had nothing to fear, Osborne added.
“Corporate social responsibility is not hostile or anti-capitalist but modern and pro-business,” he said. “We’ve said we want to use business for the delivery of public services. We’re committed to using taxpayers’ money to fund the health service and education, but believe the delivery of these services can be done by business.
“If we’re going to trust businesses with the delivery of public services, businesses need to have the best reputation within British society. So this stance is very pro-business.”
Senior Tories, and the party’s business supporters, insist that, beneath the surface hostilities, relations are good.
Shortly after Cameron won the leadership contest in December, Richard Spring, Tory MP for West Suffolk and a former Lehman’s banker, approached his new boss and asked if he could head something called the City Circle. It was a strange request. The club, launched two years ago to build bridges between the City and the Tories, had barely got off the ground.
Its founder was Howard Flight, the City fund manager and former Arundel MP, who was forced by Michael Howard to stand down weeks before the 2005 general election for talking out of turn about tax cuts.
City Circle’s database mainly consisted of Flight’s address book and had been dormant since his dramatic deselection.
Spring set about transforming it. He persuaded Michael Spencer, chief executive of Icap and the City’s richest man, to come on board as co-chairman, and recruited eight senior business figures to head panels on specialist business areas.
Each is responsible for introducing the Tory leadership to opinion formers in their areas to glean ideas, and to raise funds. The panel leaders will also be involved in policy formulation.
“If we’re looking at company- law reform, then instead of flailing round looking for the right advice, we have the head of the panel who will bring in other experts if needed,” said Spring. “The panel heads are also prepared to write papers on topics or answer questions on policy aspects.”
In June Osborne will be hosting a party for 500 City guests. This summer he will be working with the party’s tax-reform commission, chaired by former Vodafone head Sir Chris Gent, on proposals for a simpler, more competitive tax system.
Behind the scenes, too, the Tory leadership is getting to know the movers and shakers. The Sunday Times has learnt of a series of lunches and dinners held at secret locations between shadow front benchers and captains of industry. The Tory team consists of Cameron, Osborne, treasurer Jonathan Marland and Oliver Letwin, former shadow chancellor and now head of the party’s policy review.
CAN Cameron have it both ways, criticising business in public while cosying up in private? More than a decade ago Blair decided that to show voters the Labour party had changed he had to fight the unions, which he did by dumping the party’s historic Clause 4 commitment to nationalisation.
The Tory leader is trying a similar strategy. By standing up to business, party strategists think, this will reinforce the party’s modernity and draw a clear distinction between a Cameron-run party and the past.
“The aim is to completely shake up the image, get people to notice we are different and then hit them with our policies,” a party insider said. “Until we are seen as a new party, we won’t be listened to no matter what we say.”
That means dumping the old pinstriped image — not that easy for a party leader whose father was a stockbroker.
Cameron, however, is unapologetic. “I've already annoyed a number of companies by pointing out failures of corporate responsibility,” he said. “It’s not done from a desire to pick a fight with business. But I think it’s right to say what you think when you see something that’s wrong.”
In at least two respects, his strategy appears to be working. Not only are the Tories now consistently ahead of Labour in the opinion polls, by four to six points, but the party got near to 40% of the vote in this month’s local elections.
Perhaps as significantly, the friction Cameron has caused with some in business has not prevented money flooding into the Tory coffers.
The quarterly audit of the party’s accounts showed that since Cameron became leader donations have soared to £9m, compared with only £3m last year. Even better, Labour received only £2.9m in the first three months of the year while the Liberal Democrats managed to attract a mere £683,000.
Despite these successes, Cameron has to tread carefully.Three weeks ago he accepted an invitation to speak at the Business in the Community annual conference. It was a small gathering of about 260 corporate social-responsibility officers and HR staff.
It was there that he chose to attack two of Britain’s best- known businessmen: Sir Terry Leahy of Tesco and Philip Green, the billionaire retail tycoon and owner of BHS.
Leahy’s Tesco, he suggested, might be becoming too powerful, and BHS’s marketing of Little Miss Naughty underwear to children was “harmful and creepy”.
Green, not a man you want to make an enemy of, hit back, pointing out that the product line in question had been withdrawn three years earlier. “Maybe he should catch up on his reading,” Green said. “We would never sell items that were inappropriate for the market.” A complaint went into Tory central office, saying that Green would be happy to stay out of politics if Cameron stopped poking his inexpert nose into retail.
The risk for the Tory leader is that he alienates business without convincing the public that the Tories have really changed. “I don’t know what ground the Tories are fighting on,” said a FTSE chief executive. “They seem to be making statements that are not only not traditional Tory statements but they aren’t co-ordinated statements either.”
One City businessman, approached for a donation, turned it down flat. “The Tories will hardly endear themselves to people like me, or anybody else, by attacking companies like Tesco,” he said.
The Tories used to have a marriage made in heaven with the City, but as business people try to work out what Cameron stands for the risk is that marriage may end up on the rocks.
Why we are richer but no happier
BY now David Cameron must be getting fed up being compared with King Jigme Singye Wangchuk of Bhutan, who in the 1970s said his country’s aim should be to improve gross national happiness and not gross national product.
Cameron’s language last week was slightly different — he wants to focus on ‘general well-being’ rather than GDP, but the message was more or less the same.
The Tory leader is nothing if not in tune with the times: happiness and well-being have become very fashionable subjects.
Economists, used to dealing with hard numbers, have started to study happiness. Lord Layard, the London School of Economics’ professor and Labour peer, is the most prominent British economist to turn his attention to happiness.
He has highlighted the ‘prosperity paradox’, the fact that although we have become much richer since the 1950s we are no happier. Above a certain income level — economists debate whether it is £5,500 or £11,000 a year — surveys suggest that we do not get much happier.
Why might this be? One reason is rising expectations and what economists call diminishing marginal utility. For example, when we first have a car, it changes our lives and makes us very happy. But each successive new car we buy, although better than the last, makes less of a difference. Overall, we get materially better off but not necessarily happier. We are on what some call the hedonic treadmill — we need to spend more and more, and find new ways of stimulating our senses, just to maintain the same level of happiness.
Happiness economists also identify the importance of people’s relative position in society. If everybody is getting better off at the same time, nobody feels much happier. You get happier, it is suggested, when you are rising fast compared with your peers, not when you are all gaining in line with the average.
Does any of this make sense? Critics say happiness advocates confuse the drive to get on and try to improve our lives, which is natural to everybody, with how we choose to live. We might be happier, in other words, if we chose to use our spare time doing good works, or took part in organised religion, but that has nothing to do with whether we have money or not.
Where happiness theory does have something to say is in choices. Workaholics often say they wish they had done more to save their marriage or spent more time with the children. Andrew Oswald of Warwick University estimated the value of a happy marriage at £1m. We cannot know, however, how many times different career choices would have saved marriages.
Layard suggests that governments should consider high taxation as a route to making people happy, thereby ‘holding us back from an even more fevered way of life’. Tax hikes, in other words, would make us happy.
Tory supporters will be hoping this is one bit of the happiness script Cameron ignores.
