Fishburn Hedges

10.08.2011

Boris Johnson has always had the capacity to shock, though I imagine that even No 10 were taken aback by the Mayor’s performance on the Today programme.

For Boris to overtly criticise government policy is nothing new, but to pre-emptively round on Cameron for his planned police cuts was a bold move.  Boris won’t have won friends around the Cabinet table for politicising the issue so quickly, but it was only a matter of time before police numbers became Cameron’s biggest headache.

The planned cuts to the police force were generating anger long before the events of this week.  The Sun had berated Cameron for going ‘soft ’, Tory backbenchers were agitating against Ken Clarke and the Labour leadership were revelling in an opportunity to rebrand as the party of Law & Order. 

In any context, cutting front-line police officers would have been a difficult sell to the British public.  After the tumultuous events of the last week, I think it impossible.

Fast forward to the official return of Parliament in September and can you really envisage the Prime Minister defending cuts to the Police from the dispatch box?  As Boris has proven today, Cameron will be mauled from all sides if he refuses to budge on the issue. 

Just as importantly, Law & Order remains a pivotal issue for Tory voters and Tory-leaning voters.  Cameron and Osborne are past masters of political calculation and you can guarantee that their pollsters and focus groups will be telling them to take a hard line.

Finding more money for the police will upset the Treasury, but the cost of inconveniencing George Osborne will surely be outweighed by the political imperative.  For a government that has become accustomed to performing u-turns, this looks like a straightforward decision.

If we haven’t seen a change in policy, or at least a ‘review’ announced by government by October, I will be stunned.  We have seen plenty of embarrassing u-turns in the past, but none so predictable.

Posted by Andrew Lewin