The return of real politics

It is time to get real. The financial crisis is moving to the real economy, and the phoney war is giving way to real politics. Our ComRes opinion poll today confirms the recent trend, with the Conservative lead cut to a single digit. This contrasts with the six-month period leading up to the party conferences, in which David Cameron built up an average lead of 20 percentage points. Talk about an unsustainable speculative bubble. The nine-point lead that we report today seems more likely to reflect the mood that voters would actually take into the polling booth when the election comes.

In fact, the peculiarities of the British electoral system mean that Mr Cameron is on the edge of what he needs to secure a House of Commons majority. A Tory lead of less than eight points is projected to produce a hung parliament. So Gordon Brown would be justified in taking some satisfaction from the response to his bank rescue plan.

We know that Monday seems a long time ago after a week in which the polarities of the global economy were reversed more than once, but it was only on Monday that the British Government nationalised one bank, RBS, and took a large minority stake in another, Lloyds TSB. It was only on Monday, too, that Paul Krugman, just before it was announced that he had won the Nobel prize for economics, wrote that Mr Brown may have singlehandedly saved the world financial system.

For such high praise, and with Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron paying him the added compliment of claiming that they had proposed his plan first, Mr Brown may have expected more enthusiasm from the voters. But that is always the way. British politicians can be feted abroad while the British voter looks up briefly to grumble that they ought to spend more time at home.

What cannot be denied is that Mr Brown has got his mojo back. He seems focused and confident. Yet another reorganisation of his private office is under way, and it is even possible that this time the dysfunctionality of his inner court will be reduced.

Our poll confirms that, whatever Mr Brown's part in getting us into this financial mess, Mr Cameron has failed to persuade us that he would have handled the crisis better. Although 58 per cent opposed Mr Brown's use of taxpayers' money to bail out the banks, only 25 per cent agreed that Mr Cameron would have handled the bank crisis better had he been prime minister. As The Independent on Sunday has consistently argued he would be, Mr Brown is still in the game.

That said, his position remains challenging. As the real economy suffers, the Prime Minister's familiarity with the higher mysteries of leveraged derivatives may turn out to be less than a triple-A-rated asset.

We report today that on 1 November 35,000 Northern Rock mortgage borrowers come to the end of two-year fixed-rate deals and face steep rises in payments. As John Rentoul points out opposite, the most worrying of our poll findings for Labour is that 62 per cent of respondents plan to cut spending for Christmas. In all, the picture that is painted of next year is one of rising unemployment and repossessions – words that have been used in the past decade only to describe the horrors of Conservative rule as a foil for the years of New Labour plenty.

So our poll is good news for Mr Brown, yet not good enough. It may even calm frayed Conservative nerves that it was not worse for them. But Mr Cameron finds himself in an awkward position. He wants to appear statesmanlike at a time of national crisis, and so supports the Government's bank bailout (with technical reservations), but equally he wants to ensure that Mr Brown pays the price for the failures of regulation that have rendered British banks so vulnerable.

In difficult circumstances, Mr Cameron just managed to strike the right balance. There should be no embarrassment in saying, as he did in his speech on Friday, that he wanted to help Mr Brown to put out the fire in "the house that is our economy", while criticising the Prime Minister for having helped to start it.

Mr Cameron made sensible suggestions for better regulation and also supported the argument made here last Sunday that the economic downturn is a green opportunity, not an excuse to abandon the environmental cause.

The Opposition leader promises policies over the next few weeks designed to address the problems we face in the "real" economy. This is his long-deferred test. For three years now he has floated free on a weird rhetorical confection of sunny optimism and broken-society pessimism, of astute counter-intuitive positioning and his personable manner. Over the next 18 months, it is time for him to get real. Real politics is back, everyone. Game on.