As Portillo realised nearly 20 years ago, if the voters did not trust his party’s motives, or simply found their smugness stomach-churning, nothing the Conservatives said or proposed would be granted a hearing – let alone be enacted. Osborne’s speech on Wednesday was suffused with an awareness of this. He did not simply make the case for £11.5 billion of cuts, or present the swing of the axe as a good in itself. The Chancellor’s objective was to show that fiscal stability, in which as little public money as possible is spent on debt interest, is a precondition of what he called the “compassionate society”.  Unlike so many who have held his office, this Chancellor understands that politics is not a branch of economics. He also knows that winning the argument means different things at different levels of human perception. Voters sign up to generalities about reducing public spending – and then balk at cuts that affect them directly. They may applaud the Chancellor for slashing bureaucracy. But some of them seem to take offence at his choice of hamburger. Byron, it is true, is the Bullingdon Club of burger joints. But – in fairness to Osborne – I can attest that he is an eclectic, “one nation” consumer of takeaways. His private office at the Treasury has an impressive pile of delivery menus to suit all tastes and socio-economic messages. (I opted for the Thai salad when I had lunch there – but then I’m not running for office.)  Thus far, this spending review has enjoyed a smooth and relatively untroubled launch – although the 2012 Budget, which took many days to unravel fully, is a cautionary tale in this regard. What last week’s deft choreography concealed was the fractious prelude to the statement itself, and the brinkmanship that made the preparation of this review, which covers the year of 2015-16, disproportionately tense.  On this occasion, the principal argument was not between Iain Duncan Smith and Osborne. Although IDS strayed beyond his remit when he reportedly offered to make unilateral extra cuts to help out Theresa May at the Home Office and Philip Hammond at the MoD, this was shrugged off at the Treasury. “It’s the sort of totally hopeless, well-meaning thing Iain does,” says one senior source. “You can’t have parallel negotiations.”  The inventory of welfare measures in the review – strongly backed by the public, our ICM poll today suggests – was its most jealously guarded secret, and reflected months of work by Neil O’Brien, Osborne’s special adviser, who has long understood the need to woo blue-collar voters.  At the MoD, the impasse was broken by a long series of regular meetings masterminded by the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood. The “Asterix department” – the last to hold out – was Vince Cable’s. I am told that the later exchanges between Danny Alexander, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and his fellow Lib Dem Cabinet minister were sharper than those between Osborne and Cable, who had already seen off what he regarded as a “list of horrors” of proposed cuts.  Most significantly, the Chancellor’s speech has not settled the argument, but compounded it. There is anger on Cable’s side that – as his team sees it – on Tuesday evening, less than 24 hours before the statement, the Treasury team shifted the baseline against which the cuts would be measured to make it seem that he was a bigger loser than he had expected. As the Business Secretary headed off to his dance class on Friday, his allies wondered what this apparently deliberate humiliation was intended to achieve. Here is a real Coalition sore that David Cameron and Nick Clegg will have to address.  Cuts are hard enough to achieve inside Whitehall. As public events, they are even more complicated to negotiate. It has taken the Tory party more than four years in opposition and office to get to the point where it can do this without exciting immediate public clamour (think back to the tuition fees row in 2010). The voters’ support for welfare reform is necessarily provisional: it will be withdrawn with brutal speed if Universal Credit is a disaster, or if too many truly needy people are adversely affected, or if the ever-shifting social contract is seen to have been abused.  Cuts, in other words, are about much more than ministerial fiat: a sort of Nietzschean will to fiscal power. They are part of the conversation between government and governed – a conversation that never ends, in which the motives and values of those with power are constantly scrutinised with a suspicious eye, and the public’s trust can never be taken for granted. Though he has missed his targets, Osborne has done something more significant, which is (mostly) to take the public with him.  The Right accuses him of inaction and spineless delay. But true radicalism is to be found in the realm of reality. One of Mandela’s many lessons to the world, not as secular saint but as a political practitioner of genius, is that the deepest foundation of change is something that is in very short supply these days: patience.
The Conservative Party&rsquo;s shifting relationship with the great South African   leader reflects a significant change in its style and attitude