Forget Brexit. Can May finally win over the working class? | Matthew d’Ancona

Complacency and fatalism have no part in a general election, least of all after the upsets of the past two years. We live in an age of volatility, Trumpery and brutal caprice. But let us not be delusional either: the direction of travel in this campaign is pretty clear. When an 11-point opinion poll lead over Labour is presented as a crisis for the Tories, you get a sense of where things might be heading. So – sweeping aside all the rhetorical and statistical clutter – the question we should be asking is, what sort of prime minister would Theresa May be with a larger Commons majority? Is there such a thing as Mayism, or is she simply a grey, autocratic pragmatist?

Do not expect the Conservative manifesto to answer all such questions. Since it is being principally drafted by Nick Timothy, May’s co-chief of staff, it will be an intelligently assembled document, sufficiently detailed to give May a clear mandate for the general strategy she hopes to pursue at home and in the Brexit negotiations. But there will be as few hostages to fortune as possible. No 10 knows that it needs maximum flexibility in the turbulent months and years ahead.

In the quest to categorise the delphic prime minister, it has become increasingly common to claim that her true purpose is to exploit Labour’s abject weakness to set the country on a madly rightwing trajectory. And I am sure there are some Conservative MPs who would like her to do just that. But they are setting themselves up for disappointment.

In two distinct senses, May is a postmodern politician. First, she wants to move beyond – though not to renounce – the Tory decontamination strategy pursued by the party’s modernisers. As the Conservatives’ first female chair, she argued, when it was still audacious to do so, that they had to present a more likeable and compassionate face to the voters. Her warning to her fellow Tories at the 2002 conference that they were perceived as the “nasty party” was immensely unpopular with the rank and file precisely because it was true, and it probably put her out of contention as a candidate in the 2005 leadership contest. Fifteen years on, she has not ditched this perspective: I expect Conservative campaign headquarters to deploy its newly centralised selection powers to try to ensure that the party has more than 70 female and 17 black and minority ethnic representatives in the new Commons.

But it has long been argued in May’s circle that David Cameron’s modernisers blundered by ignoring the question of class, and never appealed systematically to those outside the party’s socioeconomic base. Cameron’s objective in 2010 – sensible enough at the time – was to win over disillusioned middle-class Blairite voters. Now the demographic terms of trade have changed.

The second sense in which May is postmodern relates to the eclecticism of her ideas, her refusal to be caged by ideology, and her authentically Tory sense that history has no linear direction. In this she differs from both Jeremy Corbyn and the gleaming-eyed Brexiteers, who share a belief in a route-map to the promised land.

The Labour leader’s imagined Jerusalem seems to resemble Venezuela, mysteriously armed with expensive nuclear weapons that he promises not to use. Meanwhile, the Brexiteers dream of a hellish nativism, in which a newly detached nation combines Merrie England nostalgia with exciting trade deals and excellent wifi. I leave you to decide which is worse.

May is much harder to pin down. In her 2016 conference address, she condemned the “disproportionate targeting of young, black men” by the police, and lamented that “if you are from a black Caribbean background, you are three times more likely to be permanently excluded from school than other children”. The year before, however, she had delivered one of the most aggressive speeches on immigration by a senior Tory politician for years.

This was uncomfortable listening for those of us who believe in immigration as a cultural good as well as an economic necessity. But, her allies insisted at the time and insist still, there is no intrinsic contradiction between promoting the rights of minorities and insisting upon tougher border controls. The unifying objective, they continue, is social cohesion – not least in communities where life is very different to that experienced by middle-class pundits. You don’t have to sign up to this particular argument to see that May is a more complex politician than has been acknowledged. Yes, she wants more grammar schools: but only as an extension of the free school and academy programme, rather than a return to the compulsory 11-plus.

At the Home Office, she was as exercised by modern slavery and FGM as she was by immigration. As one of her longtime colleagues puts it: “She doesn’t think in traditional left-right terms. Look at her cabinet: Brexiteers in the foreign-facing jobs, moderates in the key domestic roles. What’s practically the first thing she commits to in the campaign? The ringfence on international aid.”

Though the official mantra of the campaign will be “Tory stability versus Labour chaos”, the more daring subtext will be a bid for the working-class vote. Already, there is a populist pledge to cut energy bills by £100 a year for 17 million families, and the promise of new employment rights (some of which will infuriate neo-Thatcherite deregulators in her party).

If specific tax cuts are proposed, you can bet that they will be focused upon the low- and moderately paid. Social mobility and aspiration will play their usual part in the Tory package. But there is a new priority as well. As one senior Conservative source puts it: “We must not insult the majority by implying that only those who ‘escape’ their origins have succeeded, as if those who simply want a decent life have failed.”

The Tory task in this campaign is to translate that sentiment into a plausible programme for government. It is a formidable challenge, a Disraelian project for the era of globalisation. But – even more than a successful Brexit – it is May’s most profound ambition. In 1997, New Labour described itself as “the political arm of none other than the British people as a whole.” Twenty years on, May’s Tories dare to seize the very same mantle for themselves.