David Cameron “barely needs to break sweat” to emerge as the dominant political figure of party conference season, says Patrick O’Flynn in the Daily Express. But while it is good for Britain to have a PM who is “not overly daunted by the demands of his great office”, millions of families face a “living standards crisis”. Those people want to hear that Cameron will “fight for their prosperity with all the many political gifts at his disposal”.
They do, agrees Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph. We may be “about to encounter a financial collapse worse than the one which followed Lehman Brothers in 2008. With it could come the end of the entire post-war European order.”
Rising unemployment, high taxes and inflation lie ahead. Yet a shocking “placidity” prevails at Westminster, where politicians “aerate” about whether or not to cut VAT. True, there is a danger in “speaking too openly about bad things”, but “there is still a gap in the market for political leaders who know how to talk both truthfully yet encouragingly about hard times”.
That’s surely what Cameron is doing, says Roland Watson in The Times. In his conference speech, he delivered “his most downbeat assessment of the economy to date” and said that there can be “no short cuts to better times”. He also rejected the idea that Britain needs to become more like India, China or Brazil, saying “we need to become more like us, the real us: hard-working, pioneering, independent, creative, adaptable, optimistic, can-do”.
That’s all very well, but Cameron is “floundering on how to marry Osborne’s fixation with budgetary rectitude to the need to stimulate a patently moribund demand”, says Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. “A policy fashioned 17 months ago for an economy expected to surge out of recession has stayed unchanged even when there is no surge.” Cameron has been lucky so far – he’s enjoyed a “successful small war, an implausible opponent” and an economy that could “hardly get worse” – but he ought to be “governing better”.
The next election is what really keeps Cameron and Osborne awake at night, says Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. Cameron’s unusual focus on the economy is dictated by the “threatening skies hanging over this conference”. By this point in the electoral cycle the Tories had hoped confidently to claim that the worst was behind us. Instead, “all is encircling gloom”. It is hard to convince voters you feel their pain when you lead the government that is presiding over it; harder still when you cannot tell them when the pain will ease. The austerity drive has reversed Cameron’s effort to decontaminate the Tories’ image as the ‘nasty party’.
The situation isn’t that dire, either for the nation or for the Tories, says Benedict Brogan in The Daily Telegraph. Everywhere you turn today, it is Conservative solutions that “are being argued for, promoted and introduced” – whether on deficit reduction, growth stimulation, social justice or Europe. Cameron is “master of all he surveys” and should “speak with confidence about offering leadership in difficult times”.