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    The Cameron regime has started, and it is clear that the Conservative party can’t survive too much more of it. He is trashing all known principles of Toryism in his quest for power.  What is the point of winning if you have to throw your ideas away in the process?

    There is no limit to the depths of cynicism Cameron will employ to get a headline in tomorrow’s newspapers, no matter what the hostage to fortune might be. Involving Bob Geldof in party decision making is naïve, superficial, short-term, and just plain dumb. Employing an arrogant media-hog like Zac Goldsmith, who owes everything to a rich Daddy, is another example of sound-bite politics where the biter is going to get bit.

    The Wall Street Journal summed it up like this in an editorial.

    “David Cameron (is) seemingly knee-deep in an effort to barter away party principles for the brightest star power he can attract.”   

    And guess which bright spark and man of the people said -

    “There's not a great difference between capitalism today and communism.”

    All will be revealed later.

    Cameron believes the sound-bite is all. He thinks people are really that stupid. He thinks because new Labour has manipulated its way to power, all the Tories have to do is emulate that formula.

    This analysis is wrong.

    New Labour won power because the Tories had become worn-out, hated, and despised and were perceived as economically disastrous. People voted Labour, not because they were impressed by slick campaigning, but in spite of it. Labour won because it wasn’t the Tories, and voters, who are bored silly by politics and want absolutely nothing to do with it at all times except on election day, thought Labour could now be trusted. They believed that socialism had been dumped. They will sling them out when it becomes obvious just how incompetent and counterproductive new Labour has been. That day is getting close, I’d say.

    Gimmicky garbage
    The new Tory leadership and its acolytes don’t like it but the secret of winning the next election is simple. Conservatives must make it absolutely clear to all the voters just how useless new Labour is and how it has trashed education, health, pensions, road policy, and the economy. A coherent, adventurous, tax-cutting, government- slashing programme should follow. Unfortunately, it will take real pain in the wallet to convince some people. The gimmicky garbage being lined up now by Cameron and his crew won’t work. It might have a dead-cat bounce effect in the media when there are no serious reasons for people to engage with politics. “Oh yes, what a nice man, with a nice smile and a girl next door wife. Oh yes he is a nice Tory”. That isn’t going to make any difference.

    Just before the end of 2005, the truly useless, hopeless hand-wringer Francis Maude, chairman of the Conservative Party no less,  appeared on BBC Radio 4’s World at One and told the audience that the first thing the party had to do was show the electorate what nice people the Tories are and how they have the nation’s future at heart.

    What nonsense.

    The nation is basically conservative in its politics, and it will return to the fold when, firstly, it has either seen through or tired of new Labour, soon to undergo metamorphosis into Gordon Brown’s Real Labour.

    Expose the madness
    The public needs the Tories to expose the madness of labour rule, and how it has failed miserably on all fronts. The public doesn’t want a vision of how nice the Tories are, and how they’ve changed and accepted all kinds of new ideas and lifestyles. They won’t be impressed by this. They won’t even be listening. What might have an impact is a vision of where we should be heading as a nation. This requires passion and rage about the Ministry of Unintended Consequences that is Labour politics and policies. Not sound-bites about redistribution of wealth.

    If anyone doubts the blind-alley nature of the Cameroon regime, take a look at the chronology.

     On day one, Cameron invited the media to meet his two new commissars for the environment. To my amazement, Cameron rolled out poor, deluded John Selwyn Gummer, who I had assumed died years ago, and pampered, trendy, know-nothing Zac Goldsmith, who fought his way to the top of the Ecologist Magazine, beating all the other highly qualified candidates in a ruthless struggle for power at the age of 27.

    Didn’t that use to be John Selwyn Gummer?
    A couple of years ago in an interview with the Guardian, Goldsmith said – “There's not a great difference between capitalism today and communism. It's just different ways of slicing up the cake. Every aspect of politics has been infiltrated by the corporations”.

    Yes, old Etonian Zac Goldsmith gave the Guardian this gem. You couldn’t make it up, to coin a phrase. He is now on the official Conservative party candidates list.

    Memo to Tory selection committees – Zac Goldsmith is a sophomoric protectionist who hates globalisation and free trade.

    Tories are fighters for free trade, unless that’s another principle Cameron is about to dump.

    Goldsmith will lead the Cameron commission on the environment, along with John Gummer. Gummer, when he was Environment Secretary, was hoodwinked into accepting the full leftie line on how humans are warming the planet by using their cars too much. For years he was the only “Tory” ever invited on Radio 4’s Today programme, because he had caved in to the dirigiste Kyoto regime, which will cripple western economies if complied with, and have not the slightest impact on the weather, either.

    Tories to redistribute wealth
    If you weren’t bothered by Cameron’s environment sound bite day, maybe Oliver Letwin’s thoughts on redistribution of wealth did. As former Arundel and South Downs MP Howard Flight said in a BBC interview, Letwin was probably just using “redistribution of wealth” as a kind of coy come-on to the media, that hey, the Tories have changed, let’s write a story about them.

    Then we had the new regime for promoting women in Parliament, where a list will be drawn up of the top candidates, driven on by that princess of tokenism, Theresa May.

    “Until we're represented by men and women in the country, regardless of race or creed, we won't be half the party we could be," Cameron said in a speech on candidate selection in Leeds.

    How does Cameron say senseless things like that and get away with it?

    Merit the sole criteria
    “Look. There’s only one party in the country which freely elected a women as leader; the Tory party. She went on to become the most successful peace-time prime minister in the 20^th century. Of all parties, the Tories need no lessons in fairness and openness. We wrote the book on that. If you’re good enough, that’s all the Tory party cares about; stuff your useless quotas.”

    Nobody said that, so I had to.

    Cameron then went on to plug tougher legislation for female equality in the workplace, to try and make pay more equal. And you say he’s a Tory? Anyone with half a brain knows that if you toughen up the legislation, you will simply stop the employment of women of child bearing age.

    And then there’s Bob Geldof. Everyone, except Peter Lilley who appointed him with Cameron’s say so, knows exactly what Geldoff thinks about poverty in Africa. Most of it makes lots of sense. Doesn’t Lilley know about the Internet?

    Geldof
    Couldn’t he have simply found out what Geldof has said? But no. Lilley has given Geldof a potential stick to beat the Tories with when the commission reports in 18 months time. The ruse of using Geldof was pathetically, childishly, transparent; just seeking a warm headline for the under-30s. Unfortunately the over-30s were throwing up.

    Dump Cameron
    This is no way to build the foundations for a solid, reforming Tory government. Labour Lite more like. Maybe the Cameroons will say Labour Lite beats Real Labour. The truth is we could have a Real Tory government, but we’ll have to dump Cameron to do it; the sooner the better. Hopefully he will crash and burn in 18 months.

    That still leaves plenty of time to get organised for William Hague.

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