Tony Drury: My prediction – David Cameron will win the 2015 General Election

The Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 has changed the nature of British politics. The next General Election will be on 7 May 2015 (although the Prime Minister has the power to extend this by two months if he chooses). It will require a no-confidence vote of two thirds in the House of Commons to bring an earlier election. If 46 Conservative MPs ask the chairman of the 1922 Committee for a vote of no-confidence against the Conservative leader, the Prime Minister would win that and would have to decide if the votes against him required him to resign. That is highly unlikely.

Therefore what is happening at the moment is irrelevant in political terms. The usual culprits, amongst them Lord Tebbit, Nadine Dorries, Liam Fox and David Davis gorge on publicity opportunities, but they are completely irrelevant within the inner circle.

It must be said that this is one of the most ineffective and lamentably crass periods of management from Downing Street seen for many years. Ed Miliband can scream and shout but it will matter not a dot. The election is two and a half years away. The deputy Prime Minister (possibly one of the least effective Government ministers I can recall) is planning his new life earning a fortune in Europe.

The Prime Minister will make policy on the hoof, back the wrong people (Andy Coulson, David Laws, Justine Greening, Andrew Mitchell and so on) and appoint the wrong person to run his election campaign. If it is to be Lynton Crosby it should be remembered that he has never won a three party election (I discount the London Lord Mayor result because Ken Livingstone is probably the only person alive who could have lost that count).

His disastrous campaign for Michael Howard in the 2005 General Election (including chucking out Howard (now Lord) Flight from Arundel and South Downs without any reference to the local Party) was epitomised for me when I attended a Campaign Headquarters breakfast. Crosby was God, lording it at the table of the good and the great and me. When it came to my time to ask a question I suggested to the great man that perhaps we might concentrate on the inflationary economic policies being pursued by Labour. He said that “in my opinion the British public are tired of the economy.”

Why am I predicting that DC will win the 2015 General Election? There are two main reasons:

a) Keynes was wrong and Hayek is right. The Austrian economist, the great advocate of the all conquering force of market cycles, once said, “to combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is an attempt to cure the evil by the very means that brought it about.”

If the present recession started in 2008 following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in America, marking the end of a global credit spree started by Bill Clinton’s desire that everybody in the Southern States should have a mortgage whether they could afford it or not, then Hayek’s theory is right. We are now compensating for the loss of value until money finds its true level of exchange. The revised regulatory mayhem and the Eurozone trials are, in fact, side shows.

The proof of the validity of this reasoning is that David Cameron is proving to be an egocentric, weak and hopelessly ineffective leader who is being run by The Notting Hill Set. But it doesn’t matter. The Chancellor is following the right policies to retain the support of the money markets and slowly the circle is turning.

b) On Thursday the Office for National Statistics will tell us that there is modest growth.

David Smith wrote in ‘The Sunday Times’ (21 October 2012), “Britain is even seen as outpacing Germany…in the medium term we can hope for better growth.”
Small businesses are expanding again. Their Federation recently said, “between 2000 and 2011 self-employment accounted for almost all the rise in private sector employment.”

A report by HSBC Commercial Banking talks about ‘Growth Pioneers’ who are steering the UK out of recession.

By May 2015 Ed Miliband will simply have run out of steam (remember that the Labour Party in its whole history has never voted out a leader), the economy will be in much better shape, credit will return (this is happening already – I am being regularly offered increased limits and free credit periods from the installment companies), banking will be stabilised and the British economic machine will be purring.

The Scottish referendum will not affect matters: there is only one Scottish Conservative MP in Westminster. The new Welsh Minister David Jones is likely to do a better job than his predecessor.

The Conservatives will win the 2015 election because voters make their decisions based primarily on an assessment of their financial prospects.

Hayek once said, “there is no possibility of balancing the budget except by increasing the national income.”

This week we will learn that the process is underway and David Cameron will win the 2015 election, whether he deserves to or not.