The French grumblings that it is us who should be down-graded, not they, contains all the class of a diving footballer who after rolling around on the turf springs up to demand that the referee sends off his opponent. We should borrow our reaction to this from the French themselves by shrugging our shoulders in their blustered faces and saying “boff”, before carrying on doing what we think is right.

In broad terms what we believe is right is for the single market to be shaped in such a flexible way that it allows separate countries to decide how best to operate. This attitude embraces the strength that competition between diverse nations gives Europe.  All games have their rules and there must be a level-playing field that allows those with good ideas to be successful. But EU rules and regulation should be kept to a minimum baseline, then sovereign nations can then decide what extra benefits/standards they would like to layer on top. Why should one country want to stop those in others from working over 48 hours per week? If Ireland can have low business taxes and still balance its books then those that choose to have more lavish state provisions should not be able to force their own considerations on another sovereign nation. The EU is a collective experience so one must accept that no-one can get everything they want, but the global pressures mean that the international competitiveness perspective should gain ‘Anglo-Saxon’ ideas an increasingly receptive audience.

The British character has always contained the potent character mix of isolationists and internationalism. And this internationalism goes well beyond the boundaries of Europe. The EU needs to be connected with the rest of the world, thus it is counter-productive for it to burn one of its most important bridges. Much of Britain’s economic strength is due to the fact we are a business friendly gate-way to the biggest single market in the world. David Cameron has got the right attitude. The UK wants to be part of a strong economic block and to do what we can to make this work, but this goodwill does not extend to subsuming ourselves into harmful folly. Britain needs to play the EU negotiating game better – we need to put more effort into building alliances with those who agree with us – but there is plenty of opportunity to shape the future structure of EU.

Yesterday the Metropolitan Police got their revenge on No10 – for what they perceive to be politicians dumping the scandal on Scotland Yard – by putting the focus back onto decision making within Cameron’s office. In what appeared to be a co-ordinated leaking Sir Paul Stephenson tantalised us by saying a mystery No10 official blocked the Met discussing hackgate with Cameron, then later in the day John Yates dramatically named No10’s Chief-of-Staff as the guilty person. (So that’s what £1,000 per day public affairs advice buys you…)

@MetLines has kindly tweeted me to say “Nick, you’re a smart guy. (Editor – flattery gets you everywhere!) What would you do to stop this thing going out of control? It’s metastasizing right now.” Here is my opinion.

Short-term crises management

1) Get the enquiry up and running. This involves announcing who will hold key positions, the terms of reference, provisional timetables and allow – maybe even encourage – the enquiry teams to start collecting information soon.
2) Stop talking about Coulson positive terms. Last night on Newsnight Damien Green repeated Cameron’s words from last week that Coulson did good work for the Conservative Party. While there is no doubt Coulson is very skilled and good with day-to-day press operations his actions have exposed the Prime Minister to a potentially fatal crisis. A series of Coulson error of judgements – including asking Neil Wallis to do some work for the party – have exacerbated this crisis. Cameron should be upfront and say that knowing what he knows now it was a mistake to employ Coulson.
3) After today’s performance people need to think that Cameron understands that things have changed and what used to be acceptable is now not so, is on top of the details of this, making decisions that are ahead of the curve, is completely behind the enquiry and police investigation, and that he embraces the new world.

Long-term prevention strategy

1) Beef up the No10 by adding some experienced voices. Ed Llwellyen should stay; he made the correct call in not allowing Cameron to be compromised. But the No10 machine is not working smoothly. Cameron team needs an experienced Leo McGarry figure whose job it is to ensure that many different parts of his organisation run well; both separately and together as a whole.
2) Cameron and his office need to spend time people managing the troops. Over the last couple of months there has been grumblings of a ‘them’ and ‘us’ relationship between the head and the body of the Conservative Parliamentary Party. One of the reasons why back-benchers may have hesitated before coming forward to support Cameron is because Coulson was his person, not our person. The best political operators I have worked with spend a lot of time on hand writing letters of thanks, going for coffee with all stakeholders and being genuinely interested in what their supporters have to say.
3) The Government needs to implement a transparent, Open Government system. As I wrote on Monday, it is better to implement what is a stated principle rather than have to do it on the back foot.
4) Talk about the economy, economy, economy. The Euro is in crises. Whatever you think of the EU project the continent is our biggest trading partner so their crises is our crises. Dealing with hackgate is important but what will really count is Team Cameron’s response to the economic crises.

Of course, in many ways we have been here before. During the expenses scandal Cameron strongly asserted that transparency was the best disinfectant against abuses of the system. When MPs who were being vilified complained that they were acting within the boundaries of what was allowed Cameron retorted that in politics it does not matter what is allowed, what counts is does your action pass the ‘Daily Mail’ test.

David Cameron was right to promise that all contact with proprietors, editors and senior newspaper executives will be publicly logged from now on, and correct to publish all meetings he has had at Chequers since he became PM. But if he had followed his own advice during the expensive scandal and been transparent from the beginning Cameron would have been admired for implementing a principled belief, rather than appearing to tactically retreat under pressure.

 The Government should learn form Hackgate and proactively shine a light on all their (including senior civil servants) contact with lobbyist, business people and interest groups, before they are forced to do so.

One truly ridiculous phrase was used by Ed Miliband at the launch of the ‘Yes’ campaign when he described the AV referendum as a “choice coming down to hope versus fear”:  clearly his speechwriters have been reading ‘The Audacity of Hope’ again. This phrase has no relevance to the argument at hand (though I may have got it wrong and in fact each Election Day in the UK sees municipal buildings filled with people angrily waving their voting slips and demanding AV so that they can stop cowering with fear under the evil yoke of FPTP). It is out of all proportion to the issue under discussion.

As well as irritating the occasional Platform 10 contributor, this kind of overblown and meaningless rhetoric has some more worrying consequences of which British politicians in all parties need to become more aware if they do not want the public to become increasingly disenchanted with the political classes.

Firstly, soaring rhetoric set expectations so high that reality is bound to disappoint – just look at what has happened to Barack Obama.  No matter what he has achieved so far on issues like health reform he was always bound to disappoint simply because his speeches were filled with the kind of inspirational phrases and words that Ed Miliband’s speechwriting team is clearly jealous of.  Obama’s team appear to have woken up to this just before he took office in 2009, with Obama saying: “I want to be realistic here… Not everything that we talked about during the campaign are we going to be able to do on [sic] the pace that we had hoped.”

It can also lead a cynical public not just ignore but actually discount any actual accomplishments as mere fabrication. One of the most widely criticised aspects of the later years of Blair’s government was the tendency of Number 10 and the Cabinet to spin what were often only minor achievements into glorious triumphs.  New Labour’s obsession with headlines obscured the very real progress that had been made on, for instance, education reform, the minimum wage or the Northern Ireland Peace process. 

Similarly, the various rapturous and high-flown speeches that Gordon Brown made as Prime Minister to try to re-energise his leadership were met with widespread derision, as were similar rhetorical efforts to kick-start an “economic recovery”; quite sensibly, the UK decided not to place their trust in a man who had, despite his talk of being “Not flash – just Gordon”, been so in thrall to headlines, pollsters and spin, that he fluffed the question of the 2007 election, made misguided attempts to talk about the Arctic Monkeys and tried to hedge his bets, media-wise, by arriving late at the signing of the Lisbon Treaty.

What the public actually wants is not highfalutin yet ultimately meaningless speeches, but honest and straightforward communication from a political class that doesn’t treat them like children yet respects the need for clear explanations.  So far, Cameron’s government has generally avoided the Ed Miliband “hope not fear” trap, perhaps having recognised that no matter how much you irritate the electorate by telling them hard times are ahead, you’ll irritate them a great deal more if you try too hard to dress it up with pretty words.

However, in terms of communication – as fellow Platform 10-er Fiona Melville has pointed out here before – the Coalition Government’s record has been less than exemplary.  Cameron and his Cabinet either appear unable to properly explain and lay the PR groundwork for complex ideas like health reform or the Forestry issue, or they sound like a bunch of policy wonks stuck in their ivory tower and completely disconnected from the public – like Letwin and his comments on the holiday habits of Sheffield residents, or Willetts and his easy-to-misconstrue remarks about feminism and social mobility, or indeed this morning’s outing for allowing universities to open up more places to people who pay for them privately. We need a senior MP or Minister who can go from media outlet to media outlet and explain complex ideas in workmanlike language.  Margaret Thatcher had her Norman Tebbitt. Tony Blair had his John Reid.  Cameron currently has no-one – despite the high hopes for Eric Pickles when he was Party Chairman. Now that he is Secretary of State at Communities, he has been very good at picking fights with councils, but less good at explaining why the localism agenda should matter to “the man on the street”.

This flaw is exacerbated by another long-running Conservative problem: no vision.  In the run-up to the 2010 election, the public remained unaware of what the party stood for.  We had dozens of policies and programmes, but no overarching narrative to communicate to the electorate, one that tied together all these individual policies into a coherent whole that they could really get to grips with. Very little has changed since then. Cameron has tried to create a storyline from his “Big Society” idea, but although there are some good policies here, it seems so far to have mainly consisted of empty sloganeering.  They have not yet managed to defuse voters’ suspicion that the Big Society is nothing but a cover for ideological cuts. 

Rhetoric is not communication. A glut of disparate policies is not a vision.  Cameron has so far avoided the pitfalls of the rhetorical strategies of Obama, Blair and Miliband by using workmanlike language, keeping expectations low and maintaining a space where future Government achievements can be recognised and absorbed by the public.  Communicating well with the public shouldn’t involve an appeal to the lowest common denominator or treating them like idiots, as has happened in the AV campaign.  We should instead trust the electorate to respond like adults to adult arguments and balanced rhetoric, delivered by someone who sounds like they have some empathy with the average UK citizen.  And if the Conservatives are able to join this to a gripping narrative, then we place ourselves in an excellent position for the next general election, regardless of the outcome in Thursday’s referendum.