Casting ahead to the 2015 election, no party leader likes what he sees

As the Westminster tempo cranks up, just as the marvel of the Olympic and Paralympic summer winds down, the main party leaders will be looking for ways of securing immediate momentum. Following his bumpy reshuffle David Cameron needs to demonstrate to an increasingly sceptical public that he hasn’t become the prisoner of a divided party and a fractious coalition. Meanwhile, Ed Miliband has to show that he has what it takes to make a popular pitch that resonates with the public on how to secure shared prosperity in straightened times, as President Obama did at theDemocratic convention last week.

Yet both leaders know that as well as successfully negotiating the party conference season they also need to cast ahead in order to get a fix on the shape of the 2015 election. It certainly isn’t going to be the campaign either would have liked. Indeed, it won’t even be the election they didn’t really want but thought they’d have to make the best of. 2015 has the look of a nightmare for all sides involved.

Occasionally the imperatives facing the nation at election time and the underlying aspirations of the victorious party leader are in harmony. Blair in 1997, Thatcher in 1979 and Macmillan in 1959 can each lay claim to having been leaders successfully channelling the prevailing public mood while keeping within touching distance of their own instinctive political projects (though all such judgments are coloured by the corrective tint of hindsight).

The victor in 2015 may not be so fortunate. David Cameron – whose natural comfort zone still remains talking breezily about the good times and giveaways around the corner – didn’t come into politics to preside over an enervating decade of economic pessimism any more than Ed Miliband did to shrink the state. Yet that is where they are headed.

Above all, this is because of our still deteriorating fiscal position. Last autumn, before the double-dip recession and the full-blown euro crisis, the Office for Budget Responsibility downgraded its growth projections, pushing back the date at which the structural deficit will be eliminated to 2017. Their forecasts now look implausibly rosy compared with those of others. Even before recent gloomy public finance figures and the growing realisation that the chancellor’s “debt rule” is very likely to be broken, no one would have been surprised if George Osborne was forced to announce a further lengthening of the era of austerity, with cuts spilling out across the decade.

This presents something of a challenge for all the party leaders. The initial Conservative strategy of going into 2015 having “cleared up Labour’s mess”, and offering major tax cuts for families, feels like a distant dream. What they are still coming to terms with, however, is the realisation that the revised plan for a 2015 parliament of two halves – “finishing the job” of austerity during the first few years before sunlight creeps through thereafter – appears increasingly optimistic. George Osborne may well end up in the unhappy position of trying to convince the public, in a haunting echo of the 2010 campaign, that he is still the man to bring the nation’s finances back into balance by the end of the next parliament.

You might think that this would make the opposition’s strategy straightforward. It certainly provides them with plenty to aim at. But it could destabilise Labour too. Their initial hope of turning the election into referendum on who has the best plan for “jobs and growth” will doubtless still feature but it may struggle to get a hearing with the public unless Labour also have convincing answers to the fiscal questions that dominate all elections – the next one more than ever.

A likely fallback position, invoking the 1997 playbook by sticking to the Conservative’s spending totals for several years with the expectation of increases later in the parliament, is also looking hopeful. And if the structural deficit is set to be with us for most of the decade it is likely to erode any wriggle-room that some on the centre-left hope exists to “do a Hollande”, adopting a slightly slower path of fiscal consolidation than their Tory rivals.

Nor will Nick Clegg be spared. Having already boxed himself in by committing to undertake a coalition spending review that locks his party into shared spending plans until 2017, a promise that looks increasingly implausible, any further extension of the austerity era would only deepen his misery. Every time Osborne’s fiscal plans are downgraded, so is confidence in Clegg’s political judgment.

The two main parties can mount a case about why they are best placed to respond. The Conservatives rest heavily on their conviction that if the exam question set for the next election is “how to secure a parliament of cuts” then Labour will never be the answer. Labour’s riposte will be that the more difficult the economic news the stronger the yearning will be for a “change election” on the economy and the greater the premium on fairness in austerity – fertile terrain for Miliband, stony ground for the incumbent Cameron.

A test of political leadership is adapting to new times and reinventing yourself as the person most able to manage them. Prospective prime ministers often don’t get to fight the election they want. Whoever wins in 2015 will be running against themselves, as well as the fiscal headwinds.

This post originally appeared on the Guardian, Comment is free