Next week, we will have a new Government; or will we? All the major figures, the Prime Minister included, will be leftovers from the previous Government.
Will it matter? Some people say that a new Government will command new support.
My own view is that the overwhelming factor which generates support or lack of it for the Government of the day is the economy.
One anecdote from the days of the Falklands War, the 25th anniversary of whose end was commemorated last Sunday, illustrates the point; it goes as follows:
In the autumn of 1981 Cecil Parkinson was made chairman of the Conservative Party and I was appointed as his deputy. At the time, we were running third in the polls to Labour and the Liberals.
Soon after I arrived at Conservative Central Office I encouraged the construction of a simple economic forecasting model which related predictions for the economy to future voting intentions.
These showed that we would start to catch up with Labour and the Liberals in the new year of 1982.
True to prediction, we overtook the Liberals in the polls at the beginning of April.
Cecil Parkinson and I decided to fix a meeting with the Prime Minister to boast about this.
The date for this meeting was April 2; the time was 6pm.
That morning the place of the meeting was changed from Downing Street to her room in the House of Commons.
Parkinson and I arrived for the meeting 10 minutes early and sat ourselves on a bench outside her office at the back of the Speaker’s chair. We were somewhat surprised to find that preceding our entry to the Prime Ministerial presence was a stream of high ranking military officers dripping with gold braid.
All became clear when Norman Tebbit passed us. “Haven’t you heard the news?” he asked.
“The Argies have invaded the Falklands.”
Somewhat predictably our political fortunes as measured by the polls crashed overnight.
It was only after the recapture of the islands that the polling figures returned precisely to the trend that we had originally identified on the basis of purely economic factors, showing once again the importance of the economy in determining political results even in the context of momentous events.
If I were Gordon Brown this would worry me a lot. Interest rates are rising as is unemployment. The new Prime Minister knows better than anyone else that the future of the economy is dodgy and that therefore, new face or not, his political prospects are to say the least uncertain.