On the leader of the opposition not having any policies.

Having faced criticism for spelling out only two actual policies - on inheritance tax and a 'married couples tax break' - David Cameron appears to have concluded that this was still one too many:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/nickrobinson/2010/01/tory_married_ta.html

As we appear to have entered the early phases of a general election campaign, what had already seemed a curious lack of detail appears more and more noteworthy. Broadly, there are two possible explanations for this almost total lack of commitments: one political, one philosophical.

The former, arguably less charitable explanation goes something like this: Cameron and Co. have taken to heart the maxim that oppositions don't win elections, governments lose them. Taken to heart, and taken to its logical extreme. Why commit yourself now, when it is not the detail of your policies that matters, but the feelings of the voters towards the other lot? By these calculations, all the Conservative party has to do to win the next election is try to look broadly competent and faintly tolerable, and wait for the government to fail (which at the moment it certainly looks like doing).

This strategy is all the more attractive in the midst of a recession, for the above reason, and also because the majority of policy announcements at the moment would constitute 'bad news'. Cuts in public spending are much more palatable in the abstract than when actual services and actual jobs face the axe. Unburdened by detail, the Tories can make all the right fiscally responsible noises without actually spelling out what would go.

The second sort of explanation is that Cameron and his clique genuinely, sincerely believe in not having any policies. I know a lot of people have trouble attributing any kind of sincerity to anyone wearing a blue rosette but stay with me people. Not having any policies is in fact a fairly respectable strand of Tory thought, though rarely so expressed. A perhaps-more-persuasive formulation might be ‘while the left believes in legislation, the tory party believes in administration’.

On this account what people want from a conservative government is most emphatically not a heap of new initiatives and programs, but just to keep things running smoothly, ideally with as little fuss as possible. (It should be apparent that in this sense, among others, Margaret Thatcher was not a typical Conservative.) The task of the opposition therefore is not to lay out an alternative legislative program so much as it is to convince that they have the right sort of instincts: this philosophy obviously marries well with a belief in smaller government; and in being pragmatic rather than dogmatic, both themes which have been prominent in Cameron’s pitch to the voters.

As long as a party remains in opposition, the two stories outlined above might well be complimentary – indeed, even be indistinguishable - and it is possible that both are factors in current Conservative thinking. Should they find themselves in power, however, this convenience will evaporate, and it will quickly become apparent how sincerely motivated their strategy was:

It’s very easy to talk about not doing anything whilst in opposition, but to get into government and actually manage not to do anything is much, much harder.