The statecraft of Davela Merkeron

WHILE wandering in the Peloponnesian countryside, Philopoemen, an Achaean general, would gesture to folds in the landscape and ask his friends: “If the enemy should be upon that hill, and we should find ourselves here with our army, with whom would be the advantage?” Machiavelli cites this in “The Prince”, his treatise on power, to support his argument that a leader should remain on a war footing during peacetime. Without acting as if an enemy is always over the next hill, he argues, the prince will lose the discipline and loyalty of his sergeants and people. He will lose his edge.

Bagehot commends the example to David Cameron, whose Conservative party is without significant external foe. On August 25th a poll by ComRes put it on 42%, its best result since 2010. The Labour Party is tearing itself apart and will imminently make Jeremy Corbyn, an unelectable albatross, its leader. Even the right-populists of UKIP are mired in infighting. For the first time in his decade-old leadership of the Tories, Mr Cameron is experiencing something that only two other recent prime ministers (Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair) have known: hegemony.

Yet political dominance is not without its hazards. Winning it could be to the Tories what winning the lottery is to those poor souls who end up divorced and miserable; leaving the party divided and Mr Cameron ineffectual. Like sudden money, sudden power begets squabbles about how it should be used: Eurosceptic MPs are already planning to hijack the upcoming Conservative conference with whining about Mr Cameron’s renegotiation of Britain’s EU membership. It also attracts pretenders: the prime minister’s rivals are circling, some flirting with disloyalty in their bids to woo party members (Boris Johnson, London’s mayor, may yet back an “out” vote in the EU referendum). And it makes MPs relaxed about disunity: many plan to rebel in forthcoming votes on military action, data protection and devolution. The prime minister’s post-election honeymoon is about to end.

What to do? Bagehot submits that Mr Cameron should follow the example of Angela Merkel. His circumstances, it is true, are other than those of the German chancellor. He is a Cavalier in an adversarial parliamentary system; Mrs Merkel is a Roundhead in a federal, consensus-based one. Yet she knows how to manage a party that is riding high (in polls, her CDU has long hovered around the 42% mark that the Tories have only now reached); how to govern with no powerful rivals; how to preserve, deploy and enhance a hard-won political hegemony. Her formula echoes Machiavelli’s maxim of 500 years ago (and Philopoemen’s actions of two millennia earlier): always imagine that your enemy is cresting the nearest hill; always act as if you are days from a narrow election. This Machtkalkül—her constant, careful calibration of political risks and assets—has several aspects.

Merkiavelli’s method

A fundamental one is her close relationship with the public. Mrs Merkel obsesses about the views of her voters—reportedly commissioning over 600 opinion polls between 2009 and 2013—and treats these as revealed truth. She communicates directly with them through television addresses, press conferences, a weekly podcast and, recently, a national tour to discuss the quality of life in Germany. “There is a Merkel majority, but not a CDU majority,” explains one bigwig in the SPD, her bedraggled coalition partner. But Mr Cameron, though much more popular than his party, is curiously shy. By replicating the German chancellor’s confident self-promotion and hair-trigger interest in the public mood, he could perhaps achieve her ability to defeat parliamentary rebellions through sheer popularity. As part of this strategy he might rehire Lynton Crosby, the Australian pollster and big-data strategist who helped win the election for the Tories.

Central to her obsession with owning the political centre ground is Mrs Merkel’s pragmatism about policy. She quickly junks unpopular measures (like support for nuclear power) and steals popular ideas from the centre-left (like a minimum wage and rent controls). To be fair, Mr Cameron is already doing this. He talks about being a “one nation” prime minister and recently adopted electorally popular Labour policies like a “living wage” and a crackdown on tax dodging. But he could go further: outflanking Labour on house-building and rights to paternity leave, for example, or even persuading disgruntled Blairites to cross the floor once Mr Corbyn is enthroned.

Mrs Merkel’s fiercely guarded tenancy on the political centre is also about process. She consistently opts for consensus, incrementalism and—when all else fails—the dictum that an unpopular choice is “alternativeless”. Mr Cameron, meanwhile, is prone to last-minute fixes and can be both imperious and impetuous. That must stop. He could help settle the EU question by framing his renegotiation not as merely a six-month dash to repatriate powers but instead as a decade-long process to reshape the union. The sometimes-aloof prime minister could also emulate Mrs Merkel’s use of a gang of close parliamentary outriders (known as her “Boygroup”) to woo, cajole and smooth-over legislative differences. In his battles over the expansion of Heathrow airport and intervention in Syria this could make the difference between success and ignominious defeat.

The question is: can Mr Cameron do it? Copying Mrs Merkel would mean changing his hands-off style of leadership. Hers may look stately and calm, but it entails a frantic, constant calculation and recalculation of risk and reward. By contrast it is hard to imagine the prime minister spending a House of Commons debate glued to the flow of intelligence and data on his phone, or wooing his praetorian guard of MPs. But he should make the effort. Because if he does not, many in his party will run amok. And one day—sooner or later—a revived opposition, electable and ambitious, will appear over the crest of that hill. Better be ready.