Britain’s Nice Guy

You'd never know it from the graceful, self-confident address he made to a joint session of the U.S. Congress last week, but Prime Minister Gordon Brown is on the way out. That, in any event, is the growing consensus in Britain. The polls and the political chatter point toward a victory by the Conservatives under David Cameron in the next election, to be held sometime within the next 15 months.

That's the good news for Cameron. The bad news is that he is being judged altogether differently today than he was even a few months ago. He's no longer just the leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition; he's prime minister-in-waiting. Especially with the economy on the rocks, the public is paying closer attention to Cameron than it has in the past. They still seem to like what they see; polls consistently show the Tories leading Labour by 10 to 20 percent. But even Cameron's allies acknowledge he's got to raise his game. Leader of his party for just more than three years and an M.P. for less than eight, the 42-year-old is coming under increasing pressure to define himself and what a Cameron government would be like. True, policy papers continue to pile up on Conservatives.com, but Cameron remains appealing but frustratingly vague.

For a brief moment last year, it looked like Cameron's transition into power would be smooth. After a decade of Labour rule, political weariness had taken over, and Gordon Brown, lacking the panache of his predecessor, Tony Blair, looked doomed from the day he set foot in office. But when the public's unease about the economy turned to dread after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September, the Tory leader seemed uncertain how to respond—hesitating, for example, about whether to support a government bailout of the banking system. This allowed Brown—the former chancellor of the Exchequer who presided over a decade of growth under Blair before succeeding him in 2007—to hammer away at the "do-nothing Conservatives." Suddenly Cameron looked like the indecisive "ditherer" he used to accuse Brown of being.

But slowly, as the financial meltdown worsened and questions began to arise about Brown's handling of the crisis, Cameron and crew sought to make up for lost ground. To match Brown's propensity for wonkishness, Cameron's conservatives took on "seriousness" and "experience" as their watchwords. To balance the perceived lighter-weight credentials of Cameron's friend and shadow chancellor, 37-year-old George Osborne, Cameron brought back as shadow business secretary the avuncular and popular Ken Clarke, a 68-year-old who had served in Margaret Thatcher and John Major's governments. Cameron promoted his respected and articulate shadow foreign secretary, former party leader William Hague, 47, making him his deputy "in all but name," as he put it. And Cameron's team moved beyond writing policy papers and into action. The shadow cabinet has begun meeting with senior civil servants to prepare a government changeover, and teams of consultants from KPMG and Deloitte, he says, have been "embedded in the process" of constructing what the M.P. calls "a 100-days-and-beyond plan. (He declined to disclose any specifics "so far ahead of the election.")

It's hard to avoid the comparisons to the last young politician to prepare to move into 10 Downing Street—Blair—and Cameron has done everything he can to invite them. In the early days of his leadership, Cameron would tell people privately that he, not Brown (whom the Conservatives loved to paint as an un-Blairite Old Labour retrograde), was the rightful "heir to Blair." But now that presumption—implying that Cameron shares Blair's centrist pragmatism—is coming back to haunt him. There's enough truth to the claim that Cameron is now being held to the Blair standard, yet the differences are stark. Blair swept into office at the age of 43 on a platform of quite specific planks, from the practical (cutting class sizes and hospital waiting lists) to the constitutional (devolving power from London to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). By the time of the 1997 election, Blair personified not only youthfulness and the future, but also a tangible break from Old Labour as well as Thatcherite conservatism.

A Conservative victory would have little of the momentous watershed feeling that accompanied Blair's triumph. Since taking the reins of the Conservative Party in 2005, Cameron's main objective has been not to develop a coherent alternative to New Labour—in fact he has embraced much of its centrist agenda—but to soften the hard edges of a political machine with a reputation for being the "nasty party." As a former public-relations executive, Cameron knew how to use language to shape his image and reshape his party's. The Tories were temporarily rebranded on their Web site as "Cameron's Conservatives," and Cameron spoke—a lot—about a responsibility to protect the environment, "social justice" and "global poverty."

For now, that kind of rhetoric may work in Cameron's favor. When it comes to policy development by an opposition party, too many specifics can dangerously narrow a politician's appeal when he's seeking the widest possible support. And for most of Cameron's time as leader, this style-over-substance strategy has worked. Andrew Cooper of the polling firm Populus notes that before Cameron was elected leader, the Tories were "constantly stuck" at about 32 percent of the vote, with Labour well ahead and the Liberal Democrats behind. Following Cameron's election, he says, the Conservatives "instantly" rose to 37 percent and has topped 40 for the better part of the last year and a half—a level not attained by the conservatives since the late '80s. "While it's pretty clear to voters that the party itself hasn't changed," says Cooper, the difference is that the party "now has David Cameron."

But as the election approaches, Cameron will have to balance the hard work of preparing his troops for the coming battle with hanging onto his most precious electoral asset: his likability. Even his political antagonists recognize this quality in Cameron. "He's a nice guy," Labour Health Secretary Alan Johnson said in an interview with The Sunday Times—an opinion widely shared, as demonstrated by the unambiguous national outpouring of emotion and support after the February death of the eldest of Cameron's three children, 6-year-old Ivan, who suffered from a rare neurological disorder.

Belying the fact that Cameron was all spin, and that his life was a bed of roses as a rich Eton and Oxford man, Ivan was at the heart of his father's un-Torylike devotion to the National Health Service, cornerstone of Britain's postwar welfare state. "I have a child who's not too well, so I've seen a lot of the NHS from the inside," he said a month after becoming party leader. "In fact, in the last three years, I've probably spent more time in NHS hospitals than any politician apart from the few doctors in the House of Commons." Extremely fine words, and obviously heartfelt. But as Johnson said in his interview, "Cameron's been very skillful at the way he has projected his own image onto his party. Now there is a feeling that, yes, you are a nice guy, but what is next?" Almost certainly, Prime Minister Cameron is what's next. It's what comes afterward that really counts.