Jeremy Corbyn victory presents Tory opportunity

If David Cameron showed up to parliament in his Bullingdon Club tailcoat to announce the sale of Great Ormond Street children's hospital to a consortium led by ExxonMobil, his Conservatives would still be competitive against Jeremy Corbyn's Labour at Britain's next election.

An immutable law of politics is often mangled in the telling: elections are not won "on the centre ground", but by whomever is nearest to it. What matters is a party's relative, not absolute, position on the continuum of ideas. There is no need to navigate by compass and slide rule to the exact geometric middle. Margaret Thatcher did not govern to please the median Briton. It was enough that she was more mindful of that voter than her principal opponents were.

Once you understand this law properly, it dawns that a universe of opportunity opened up for the Conservatives on Saturday, when the Labour party elected the oddest leader in its history.

Jeremy Corbyn, and the stain of extremism that will stick to the Labour name long after he has gone, presents the Tories with the opposite of a dilemma: a choice of two attractive courses of action, both of which assure at least one more victory in 2020.

They can hold the middle ground that Labour has evacuated, or they can govern some way to the right. The first would restore their old purpose as the default party of government, when they lost the occasional election as if to give themselves a breather. The second would change the country – curbing the state, opening up public services – at the cost of provoking voters a bit more.

Monopoly on power

A virtual monopoly on power for a generation or an exciting rupture in policy. In normal times, this choice is no choice at all, for any aggressive reform would risk electoral defeat to more moderate opponents.

But Mr Cameron’s opponents have no pretensions to moderation. Almost whatever he does, he will be nearer the centre ground than a Corbynite Labour party, with its mid-20th century economics and willingness to see the positive side of paramilitaries from Northern Ireland to the Levant.

Those of us who tend to counsel politicians to the middle ground can continue to make the principled case but we cannot pretend it is electorally essential too. Not in these circumstances. The Conservatives can govern fairly stridently and still win. Now, if not very often, the Tory right is right.

To judge by the opening months of his second term, Mr Cameron would rather build a Conservative imperium than make his name with a blast of right-wing reform. George Osborne, his chancellor, has taken the edge off the fiscal consolidation and instituted a Labourish living wage. Both men are temperamentally geared for power first and legacy second, even if the gap between the two ambitions has narrowed in Mr Osborne's soul. There is no disgrace in their caution: steady government is lasting government and Britain is not a country that needs to start again from first principles.

Corporate-run schools

But what might a sharper discontinuity look like? Freed from any serious political competition, the Conservatives could allow for-profit bodies to set up free schools, which are state-funded but independently run. This would tempt large companies to establish national chains of schools, each offering a brand and a consistency of performance that parents can trust.

Mr Cameron could also wean the BBC off its licence fee, authorise a third runway for Heathrow airport, vary public sector pay according to region and tilt the weight of taxation from earned income to assets. None of these projects is volcanically unpopular but they are all provocative enough to be ducked by most governments most of the time. If Mr Cameron does not do them now, with Labour lost in its own distemper, it is hard to picture who ever will.

The prime minister’s enemies tend to dwell on his privilege. If anything, they understate the case. Eton, loving parents, a village rectory for a childhood home: this was only the start of his maddening good fortune.

The real luck took hold in his career, during which Labour has pioneered new ways to make his life easy. They cashiered their only viable leader of the past 40 years, Tony Blair, and tried three replacements – Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband and now Mr Corbyn – who were each not only unelectable but progressively worse than the previous one.

How Mr Cameron and his chancellor use this luck will decide the size of the imprint they leave on history. They can establish their party as the reflex choice for working Britons or fashion a state in their own image. Each way probably brings victory in five years’ time. Only one brings a legacy that will resonate in 50 years’ time.– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2015