Tories shipshape thanks to Crosby

The Australian strategist is credited with focusing the Conservatives.

Lynton Crosby. It sounds like the name of an obscure Norfolk railway station or a shaggy 1970s folk band.

In fact Lynton Crosby is a man an Australian, hence his unusual name. He’s the strategist hired by David Cameron to get the Tories into election-winning shape. And he’s succeeding.

Conservative MPs went off on their summer break last week believing, for the first time, they can win in 2015.

Such was the gaiety in the Chamber that when Cheryl Gillan got up to speak sporting a leopard-patterned outfit backbenchers behind her including Keith Simpson, a man whose choice of glasses and moustache make him look so much like he’s stepped straight from Stanley Baldwin’s Cabinet of the 1930s that some suspect that he’s actually a ghost growled and clawed the air like big cats. The hilarity!

Crosby’s success has Labour gunning for him.

At Prime Minister’s Questions Ed Miliband tried to hint that Crosby had a hand in the Government’s decision to dump proposals to force cigarettes to be sold in plain packaging.

The Coalition Government doesn’t need any help performing a U-turn last week they casually canned plans to copy the Scottish Government’s minimum alcohol pricing policy.

Crosby is credited with focusing the Conservatives.

He calls it “brushing the barnacles off the boat”. So side issues like gay marriage, environmental concerns, Europe and, yes, plain cigarette packaging are dialled down in favour of a few core messages.

These are that the economy is healing, the Government is getting a grip on welfare and that immigration is reducing.

However, the economic recovery is painfully slow, some might say the Government’s attitude to welfare is more like a stranglehold than getting a grip and it’s open to debate whether cutting immigration is actually good for the economy.

But all three core messages are true. And they point to the nub of the Tories’ election message that they are getting on with the job and should be entrusted to finish it in the years after 2015.

Even with the barnacles banished it won’t be plain sailing through to the general election for the Conservatives. Crosby needs to get the party shipshape now to weather what will be an almighty storm next spring when they inevitably trail in third in the Euro elections behind Labour and Ukip.

For now, though, the clear blue water around the Conservatives is calm. Which may be why a couple of ministers figured they could rock the boat a little last week.

Jeremy Hunt made a report into failings in the NHS in England very party political. In a particularly unedifying episode, Hunt and his Labour shadow Andy Burnham tried to blame each other for NHS shortcomings that ultimately are a matter of life and death.

Later in the week, Maria Miller decided to write to the BBC after sports presenter John Inverdale, in what were undoubtedly outrageously sexist remarks, described women’s Wimbledon champion Marion Bartoli as “not a looker”.

Why it’s taken Miller two weeks to write is open to conjecture. It could be that she wants to do something eye-catching ahead of her holidays. It could be that, given her reputation for intellectual prowess, it took her two weeks to master the spelling of “derogatory”.

Both ministers ought to bear in mind that the institutions they’ve attacked have more in common than just sharing names of three letters. The public hold both the NHS and the BBC in much higher regard than they do parliament or politicians.

Hunt and Miller may have been buoyed by the cheery mood among the Conservative crew just now but there’s a reshuffle on the horizon.

Overreach themselves and they’ll end up overboard.