“an emollient  motor-mouth, a vacuous man with no guiding principles, who talks in management clichés and opaque jargon”

       “Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad” said Greek tragedian Euripides.

    I don’t know what the Tories have done to deserve being made mad by the gods, but I can’t think of any other explanation for David Cameron’s runaway victory for the Tory leadership. The Tories have been induced to junk the career of a superbly qualified contender in David Davis who has served in cabinets, achieved in business, fought against a deprived childhood to gain a university degree, and generally paid his dues.

    It defies sense whichever way you look at Cameron’s victory. The only reason that the Parliamentary party and 134,446 party members voted Cameron is blind lust for the limousines of power. They want it so badly it has destroyed rational judgement. It doesn’t matter that Cameron has no political philosophy that anyone’s aware off. All that matters is power.

    No matter that a Tory government led by Cameron is likely to be a pathetic Labour Lite version. Do these people seriously want a Tory government at any price? The sad answer is clearly yes.  As I’m not a career politician I just don’t want a Tory government that trashes its principles in the name of winning elections. What is required is a little patience and self discipline in the ranks.

Trashing the country
    Sometimes political parties just go out of fashion. Most sane people must know that the current Labour government is trashing our country. Education standards have crumbled. Health care remains almost third-world despite huge sums of money being thrown at it. Transport is in chaos. Labour has screwed up private pensions which used to be the envy of Europe. Out of control spending has given us an over-wheening state which now accounts for 42 per cent of GDP, up from 38 per cent in 2000. The economy is drifting to disaster with falling consumer confidence taking tax receipts with it.

    The golden inheritance that Labour inherited from the Conservatives has more or less been dissipated. At least most people now know that just throwing money at problems doesn’t cure them. This is not a time to junk sound, Conservative policies.

Self confidence
    Everywhere you look you see Labour’s arrogance and incompetence. A little steadfastness and self-confidence from Conservatives and the votes will return.

    But just as the Labour government is about to crash and burn, the Tory party chooses a leader who has more in common (I think, he hates specifics so) with the doomed policies of Labour, or the warm-words and inactivity of the Liberal Democrats. His resume is paper thin. His achievements, well, he just doesn’t have any. Cameron was a two-bit PR man for a low-rent company called Carlton Television for 4 years. He carried Norman Lamont’s bags for a couple of years. He’s been in Parliament for 4 years. That’s it. Cameron is an emollient  motor-mouth, a vacuous man with no guiding principles, who talks in management clichés and opaque jargon. The only thing the guy has that is truly impressive, is that he had the cojones to go for it with such little ammunition in his locker.

Gigantic bluff
    So he has unbelievable arrogance, and enough contempt for the membership of the Conservative Party that he thought he could pull off this gigantic bluff. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the whole Cameron-mania thing has been media induced. I’m not saying that this is a conspiracy; only that from the moment of Cameron’s speech to the Conservative Party conference, the media seemed to crank itself up into believing that this would be the winner. Any rational assessment of the speech by an outsider would have seen it as a pathetic little piece of blather, notable only for a quite nauseating and cynical use of his sick child as a political prop. The vomit-inducing use of his pregnant wife was repeated after his victory speech on Tuesday.

    And what a speech it was, full of meaningless clichés as we’ve come to expect.

    “I want to us give this country a modern compassionate Conservatism that is right for country,” said Cameron.

Does “modern” actually mean anything?
    Every time I hear Labour’s Blair use “modern” something snaps inside me. Just what does this mean? I reach for my mythical sub-machine gun every time I hear Cameron use the word. This is going to give me RSI I think.    

    “We need to change the way we feel. No more grumbling about modern Britain. I love this country as it is, not as it was. We need to change the way we think. It’s not enough just to talk about tackling problems in our inner cities, we have to have all of the right ideas for turning these communities around,” says the master tactician.   

    He went on to talk about having a “full-bodied economic policy, not just a tax policy”.    

Derision deserved
    In a rational world, the media would have been full of derision for such pathetic platitudes. But Cameron is taken seriously.

    There are still some Conservatives left who want to hear some truly radical policies which will turn the country around and solve some of the festering problems. The debate about health care has been in a straitjacket for more than 60 years, as the public was first brainwashed into believing that the NHS not only provided world-class healthcare, but was the envy of the world. Many people still clearly believe this lie. I want a conservative party which will challenge this cosy and corrupt system of health care which is clearly failing compared with the Germans, French and Americans. I want relief from health care being dominated by the kinds of fascists who call for the overweight or smokers to be denied treatment.   

    I want new ideas in education which will seek to restore the pathway to university for the underprivileged, which was lost by dumping grammar schools. How did we get to the point where nobody questions the fact that the state controls education?

Go for grammars
    I listened recently to “Lady” Williams, failed socialist and now a dopey liberal democrat, insisting that grammar schools are bad because those left behind don’t get a decent education. Surely it makes sense to improve secondary education outside the grammar schools, rather than levelling down the whole process, destroying excellence, and confiscating the ladder that the poor had to world class education via the 11 plus.

    How can a “modern” Conservative like David Willetts, responding to a question on education on BBC TV’s Question Time also graced by “Lady” Williams, refused to admit, after persistent questioning, that there should be more grammar schools? This is a Conservative against grammar schools. Who was he afraid of offending?

Climate change bureaucracy
     In his flimsy manifesto for the leadership, Cameron did let his guard slip a little. He put deregulation high up on his list of priorities, but a bit further down included a policy which will probably be the biggest friend of the bureaucrat anyone has ever come up with. Cameron urges us to meet big global challenges like “climate change”, as though it is in our power to change the climate.

    Not mentioned in the manifesto is his previous speech about climate change, where he said he wants to join with the Liberal Democrats to set up a government Carbon Trust to limit the amount of CO2 which each and every business and individual in the land would be allowed. That would generate world class levels of bureaucracy, cripple the economy, while of course, achieving absolutely nothing in terms of climate change.

Arrogance, incompetence
    So Conservative Lemmings for Cameron have won the day. This could start a new trend in politics, where the highest posts are handed out to those with the least experience, (as long as they are glib and presentable) and those who sweat to better themselves are junked. In a way you could argue that this would make little difference with the Labour party in charge. Arrogance and incompetence, after all, are acquired easily.

    But outside of politics, hopefully, the idea won’t catch on. I don’t want the chief surgeon doing my heart bypass operation to be some pimply bumbler just out of medical school with a nice smile and an empty CV.

---

Neil Winton – December 7, 2005

 Top