Hijacked by a cack-handed announcement
George Osborne has a habit of stealing the Tory conference limelight (remember his pledge to raise the inheritance tax threshold to £1m?) in a way that cheers the Tory faithful. Not so with his promise to abolish child benefit for higher-band income tax payers. This has dominated - indeed hijacked - the Birmingham conference in a way that Tory party managers never envisaged - to such an extent that no other message is getting out of Brum to the wider public.
David Cameron has had to tour the studios trying to hose down the forest fire of complaints from stay-at-home mums and the Mumsnet crowd.
Click to watch Mumsnet's Justine Roberts on Tuesday's Daily Politics.
His Chancellor has had to write privately to every Tory MP to convince them that his wheeze really is a good idea. Both have hinted that they might revive the old Tory plan to give married couples a tax break, though that was never meant to apply to higher-rate payers and wouldn't fully compensate them for the loss of child benefit anyway.
The irony is that most of the Tory activists in Birmingham do not object to the principle of stopping child benefit for the better off. They just object to the unfair and anomalous way in which it's being done (see my previous blog). They are even prepared to contemplate the end of universal benefits in general, with everything means-tested and concentrated on the less well off. But the party leadership has lost its appetite for this wider debate in the wake of the debacle over child benefits.
The Tory leadership will take comfort from a poll in this morning's Sun showing the withdrawal of child benefit from higher earners to be more popular with the country at large than it is with the Tory conference. But voters are hardly likely to object to a change which does not harm 85% of earners. It is the damage to the core Tory vote that Mr Cameron's folk need to worry about -- and not just those already in the higher tax brackets.
This afternoon Mr Cameron, in an effort to shift attention away from child benefits, will extol the virtues of the "doers and grafters" in society, in an echo of Margaret Thatcher's championing of the country's strivers three decades ago. But most of Mr Cameron's strivers are precisely those who hope very soon their hard work will take them into the £40,000-plus bracket -- and when they do will now be clobbered by an expensive loss of child benefit which will leave them worse off.
This afternoon we will hear a lot about the sunny uplands of the Tory Promised Land once the spending cuts have worked their way through the economy.
Several passages will mark a return to his "let sunshine win the day" rhetoric, which might stir the faithful but is meaningless to the wider public.
Mr Cameron will attempt to put child benefit behind him and send the Tory grassroots away with a spring in their step. The latest polls suggest he's in a better place than the mood of this conference would indicate.
But however uplifting the rhetoric the Tory conference of 2010 will forever be remembered as the one hijacked by a cack-handed announcement that, in principle, most folks think is reasonable.
I'd love to be a fly on the wall when the post-mortem takes place at Tory HQ back in London.
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