Faddishness and Minorities

“Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad”, so the ancient proverb goes.  I’m quietly rejoicing over the great Cyprus bank bungle, the latest symptom of European insanity and a clear sign that the gods are on my side!  I have my eye also on the craziness of our present coalition government in England, the craziness in particular of David Cameron and George Osborne, the Dumb and Dumber of our political life. 

I’m in the mood for quotations; I’m in a particular mood for Disraeli.  England does not love coalitions, he rightly said.  I would update this slightly by saying that England hates coalitions; this Englishwoman certainly does.  The grand old Tory also said that a Conservative government is an organised hypocrisy.  My, oh my, I do wonder what he would have made of our present government and the present leadership of the Conservative Party – a disorganised idiocy, perhaps? 

Lynton Crosby, Cameron’s campaign chief, has a cunning plan for a Tory victory in the scheduled 2015 general election, or so I read recently in the Telegraph.  In the wake of the drubbing the Party got in the recent Eastleigh by-election there are to be no more stupid ideas.  Really?  Then I take it we can see gay marriage and windmills dropping from the agenda?  I have a plan also for a Tory victory, though it’s not really that cunning – get rid of Cameron and Osborne. 

Take the Prime Minister…please.  Mediocre leaders are the rule rather than the exception in the Tory Party.  Margaret Thatcher?  No thanks; let’s have John Major instead.  But, my goodness, on the scale of mediocrity Cameron has no contenders.  He even manages to make Stanley Baldwin look good.  When it comes to breath-taking incompetence there are few better than Call Me Dave.  His latest wheeze was the introduction of minimum alcohol pricing.  Eh, excuse me, Prime Minister, does this not mean that the price of booze will increase when voters have had more than enough of price increases in general?  Oops – goodbye to all that.

Simple truths are simply stated – the Conservative Party led by Cameron is heading for sure defeat.  I was tempted to write that there are lies, damned lies and David Cameron but, on reflection, I think that’s unfair.  It’s better said that he is a little man lost in his own confusion.  Having no identity of his own he took on that of Tony Blair and the metro-cosmopolitans.  The Tory Party went mad when it elected him leader, much as Labour did when it elected Michael Foot.  The Cameron Manifesto is another of history’s long suicide notes.

The credibility of all politicians is pretty low these days, particularly those in the Conservative Party.  It gives me no pleasure to write this because I have only ever voted Tory – a long family tradition – and I have a great many Conservative friends.  But the Party has forfeited all credibility and all trust; people simply do not believe a word it says.  In fact the more Cameron and Osborne say the greater the disbelief.  These men are hopelessly out of touch.  The one great platform the government stood on was reduction of the public debt.  What’s happened?  It’s now more bloated than ever.  Some of the reductions we have had are beyond crazy.  Favoured socialist causes have been ring-fenced while defence spending is being slashed.  We spend millions on foreign aid while depriving tank regiments of, er, tanks.  This really is the political theatre of the absurd. 

Can things get any worse?  Yes, indeed they can.    If people distrust the Conservative Party the Conservative Party distrusts itself.  Call Me Dave’s gay marriage scheme has introduced a huge fissure into the Party ranks, one I suspect will never be fully healed.  Nobody wanted this; nobody needed this except a loud-mouthed minority.  And when it came to standing up to Europe and the European Court of Human Rights the Cameron government is nothing but piss and wind. 

Oh, yes, on the subject of wind we have what the Chancellor calls a ‘renewable levy’, a rip-off tax by any other name, one which will penalise consumers and cripple industry.  And for what?  Merely to placate another loud-mouthed minority, the green fanatics who are set on covering this green and pleasant land with ugly and unpleasant windmills. 

I do not care what Osborne says in today’s budget (I wrote this piece before I knew the details) because it will make little practical difference.  The game is up.  There are simply not enough gay couples, greens and lovers of foreign aid to secure a future Conservative government.  Under Cameron the Tory Party has become a movement of faddishness and minorities.  In future it is likely to become the biggest minority of all. 

Various Conservatives in Search of an Ideology

Six Characters in Search of an Author is a play by Luigi Pirandello, first performed in Italy in 1921. It’s an absurdist drama which might be said to have anticipated an absurdist turn in Italian politics the following year, when Mussolini did or did not march on Rome, creating his own incomprehensible drama.

David Cameron, our present Prime Minister; now there is another absurd little man. He is also the leader of the Conservative Party, for which he has penned his own drama – Various Characters in Search of an Ideology. Manicomio!, - Madness - the audience shouted at Pirandello’s premier. I doubt very many people will muster sufficient energy to pass any comment at all on the Cameron show. It’s really quite funny, though, in a sort of gallows-humour kind of way.

Cameron, as most people are aware (surely they are?), is a chip off the old Tony Blair block. He is a post-modern Tory who has forgotten, if he ever learned, the fundamental truth about the Conservative Party – it does not think; it does not do philosophy; it just is – it exists therefore it exists. But now, under the guidance of the Dear Leader, the Party is in search of an anchor; it looks to fix itself in a seabed of trendy and fashionable ideas.

Roger Scruton, who does a passable imitation of a traditional conservative thinker, as opposed to a Conservative thinker, has published a perceptive article in the March issue of Prospect. It’s headed Postmodern Tories: What does the Conservative party believe any more? Is it meant to believe anything, I ask? The answer is, yes; unfortunately it is. Nature, after all, hates a vacuum. His article is a reflection on two recent publications: Britannia Unchained, co-authored by a group of up-thrusting and young Conservative Members of Parliament, and Tory Modernisation 2.0, issued by Bright Blue, an organisation that apparently campaigns for reform within the Conservative Party. Where the Number 2.0 comes from I have no idea. Oh, well, maybe I do!

The authors of Britannia Unchained include Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel and Dominic Raab, a measure of just how far the cosmopolitan and deracinated Cameron project has advanced in recent years. As some of you may have noted, I’m reading the Palliser novels, Anthony Trollope’s epic account of nineteenth century English political life and political attitudes. It’s put me in rather a nostalgic mood, longing for good old-fashioned Tory names like Sir Orlando Drought and Sir Timothy Beeswax. Alas, I fear I’m a hopeless case when it comes to post-modern modernisation.

I’m getting away from the point, the point being Scruton’s article. The philosophy here is deep and difficult, he writes, but the rhetoric is easy. Matthew Arnold put it well: “...a very good horse to ride; but to ride somewhere.” Aye, there’s the rub. Where is this horse being ridden? Just about as far away from the bedrock of conservatism as is possible to get; as far away from Adam Smith, Edmund Burke and David Hume managed to get, those fossils whose accounts are of no account compared with the masterly analysis of Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel and Dominic Raab, to say nothing of the Blue Group, whoever they are. Today’s winning rhetoric is all about ‘fairness’, ‘compassion’ and ‘cuddles.’ Who exactly is taken in by this rot? Honestly, I have no idea.

As Scruton says, even those on the right (right of what?) who believe that the long-term effect of this rhetoric is to make everyone dependent on the state, and the state dependent on borrowing from a purely imaginary future, will go on repeating it. It’s all about being caring, fairing and nice; it’s about hugging a hoodie; it’s all about singing Kumbaya around a vast communal bonfire. That’s not Scruton; that’s my own spin, my view of the Cameroons, situated in those tropics where intelligence simply melts in the heat.

The Tory past is a foreign country; they did things differently there. The Tory past includes Sir Robert Peel, himself something of a moderniser. Peel was clear enough in his view:

By Conservative principles I mean ... the maintenance of the Peerage and Monarchy — the continuance of the just powers and attributes of King, Lords and Commons in this country ... By Conservative principles I mean that, coexistent with equality of civil rights and privileges, there shall be an established religion and imperishable faith and that established religion shall maintain the doctrines of the Protestant Church ... By Conservative principles, I mean ... the maintenance, defence and continuance of those laws, those institutions, that society, and those habits and manners, which have contributed to and mould and form the character of Englishmen.

Now just imagine ‘Call me Dave’ thinking or speaking like that! Call me Dave calls to the founder of modern Conservatism, saying that he supports gay marriage not in spite of being a Conservative but because he is a Conservative. I suppose it’s a measure of just how healthy the Party is now under his Gay Watch that he is receiving all sorts of helpful advice on ‘modernisation’ from publications like the New Statesman. It’s quite understandable from their point of view, a meaningful political strategy. After all, why bother attempting to deconstruct and destroy the Conservative Party when its leader is doing such a first class job? Just help them bit by bit along the road to modernisation and electoral oblivion. This first class job, incidentally, includes the deconstruction of England itself, a project begun so admirably by Tony Blair.

Scruton’s conclusion hits home;

Those are only some of the problems faced, now, by the Conservative party in its search for a defining philosophy. Demographic changes, highlighted by the recent census, further emphasise the difficulty in reformulating the philosophy of “us.” Far easier, you might think, to replace “us” with everyone, to dissolve the country and its culture in the abstract idea of human rights, and to march with Nick Clegg into a transnational future, leaving England on the dust-heap of history. That, in effect, is what the “modernisation wing” of the Tory party is hoping for—a new kind of conservatism which conserves nothing, changes everything, and is guided by the very same rhetoric of equality and human rights that shapes the left-liberal agenda. If that is where we are, then conservatism is dead.

That, Dear Roger, is exactly where we are. Conservatism, at lest insofar as it is embodied in the modern Conservative Party, is dead. What we have in its place is a Party committed to a loose amalgam of trendy metropolitan causes, as trendy and as metropolitan as those who pen advice on modernisation, on forms of political innovation that nobody beyond themselves has any interest in, apart from the liberal left, that is, who see a chance of nailing Conservatism forever.

There is a tiny ray of hope. Conservatism in the small c sense isn’t dead; it’s too much a part of the English character for that. But it has no effective voice in the representative bodies of our nation. Real conservatism has been defined as ‘nasty’ by the persuasive pundits who now supposedly speak from the right.

And me? I’m opposed to Cameron not in spite of being a conservative but because I am a conservative. I would never dream, though, of being a Conservative, not now, not at any time in the foreseeable future. My mind is too empty and too nasty for that, too lost in the past. Apart from that, my name isn’t foreign or cosmopolitan or post-modern enough.

The Sixteenth Pluviôse of David Cameron

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Karl Marx said that everything in history occurs twice, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce.  The Eighteenth Brumaire is a reference to the date on the French revolutionary calendar when Napoleon Bonaparte – the tragic hero – seized power in 1799 in a coup d'état.  Louis Napoleon is the nephew, a grotesque mediocrity, who had his own Eighteenth Brumaire in 1851, subsequently creating the comic opera Second Empire.

It’s not often that I agree with anything that Karl Marx said or wrote, but here I think he has a point – tragic greatness is succeeded inevitability by laughable mediocrity.  In the history of British Toryism, for instance, we have Sir Robert Peel, the man who shaped the modern Conservative Party and then almost destroyed it by later supporting the repeal of the Corn Laws, thereby undermining the economic power of the landed gentry.  In this instance Peel put Country above Party.  It was for him an issue of necessity and of principle, an issue that destroyed him personally, an issue that divided the Party irrevocably. 

Peel is the tragic greatness.  Now at last we have the farce; we have David Cameron, the present leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister under a Coalition government.  He, too, has fought on an issue of principle; he, too, has laid down the lines of battle; he, too, has presided over a new split in the Party.  And what is his great issue of principle; what is his Corn Law moment?  Was it the level of public debt, was it unemployment, was it the danger of another wave of mass migration from Eastern Europe; was it over our ancient constitutional liberties?  No, his Corn Law moment is...same sex marriage.  This is Cameron’s gay moment in history.

Parliament voted on this rainbow flagship policy on Tuesday 5 February (Sixteen Pluviôse!), with a healthy majority in favour.  Unfortunately for Cameron, who did not even have the courage to attend the debate, 134 Tory MPs voted against with 35 abstentions.  Even some members of the cabinet and the government’s own top lawyer voted against.  Only 126 voted in favour.  The measure was carried with the overwhelming support of the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties.  Is this the beginning of the end for the Cameroons, I have to ask?  Toryism, in any meaningful sense, is already dead.

I’ve been re-reading George Orwell.  My, what fun he would have had with modern politics, the lies, the absurdity, the dissimulation and the hypocrisy.  I look at David Cameron, I look at Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats and Deputy Prime Minister, and I look at Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour opposition, and what do I see?  I’m not sure.  A terrible sameness, that much is clear, as if they had all been cast from a single mould.  Wait; I know exactly what I’m reminded of, the concluding words of Animal Farm – “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”  I cannot say which is which. 

Social conservatism died last week.  No, it did not; it’s alive in the country at large, but in Parliament it lacks representatives among the leadership of the three main parties, a point made by Charles Moore writing in the latest issue of the Spectator.  It’s a momentous disenfranchisement, as he puts it.

He makes some other points, things I’m wholly in agreement with.  Personally I could not care less if a fat nancy boys (oops; sorry; it’s the Orwell influence) like Elton John go through some parody of Christian marriage or not.  I’m wholly indifferent, just as I would be if dogs decided on nuptials; it’s no business of mine.  Besides, I suspect that there is a comedy goldmine here.  Oh, the joys to come, like gay divorce and gay custody battles. 

But, surely, the onward march of equality is not to be halted?  By what right, Moore asks, do we oppose polygamy?  After all, Muslims believe that a man has a right to take up to four wives.  Why does our present law disrespect their traditions?  Pure prejudice, clearly.  And there is more.  For, you see, Moore has logic and history and progress on his side;

The same-sexers express old-fashioned disgust at their opponents’ suggestion that their arguments could justify incest, but I do not see why. The gay marriage case is that marriage is good if people love one another very much. Why, by their argument, should this not apply to siblings who feel that way about each other or parents and their (adult) children? Are they saying that certain sex acts are disgusting? If so, on what grounds? Besides, gay incestuous marriages could not possibly pose any genetic risk, since they can produce no offspring. What taboo from the dark ages is holding the reformers back?

Good questions, Charles, you soft old leftie; what is holding the pig politicians back?  Surely not the fear of an adverse reaction by the public, who, as we all know, are fully behind the progressive agenda.  Oh, don’t take my word for it; the Economist has spoken here, and we all know how perspicacious and prescient the Economist is.  The opponents of gay marriage, you see, are a lot of old fogies (Zimmer-framing the issue, 9 February).  The grey vote may be the stronghold of bigots but look to the young, fully behind progress and equality;

To win in 2015 the Tories must target younger voters, who are disproportionately present in marginal seats.  Whisper it softly, but in setting himself against many of his MPs, Mr. Cameron – the party’s greatest electoral asset – may have improved their prospects of re-election.

An interesting viewpoint, don’t you agree?  Hey, but why whisper it softly?  David Cameron, the party’s great electoral asset, Mr. Bullingdon Club himself, will ride back into government, possibly with a decent majority, on the back of a lot of metropolitan fads.  Yes. England has turned into Islington! 

I’m quite prepared to admit that most people in my age group will give the soft soap response when asked for their opinion on equality.  It’s only fair, innit?  But what is clearly beyond the wit of the arses on the Economist is that when people vote, if they vote at all, and when voting is not simply a reflex, they do so because there are matters of deep personal concern to them.  Just imagine all the proles approaching the ballot box in 2015, in a fey and gay mood.  It’s just so, so difficult to control my natural cynicism.  How many divisions does the Pope have?, Stalin asked in dismissive scorn.  How many votes are there in gay marriage?  Oh, don’t look to me for an answer.  Ask David Cameron. 

George Orwell (him again!) wrote of Jonathan Swift, the great eighteenth century satirist, that he was “one of those people who are driven to a perverse Toryism by the follies of the progressive party of the moment.”  I was driven to perverse Toryism at an early age, the influence of my much loved grandfather, a county gentleman of the old caste.  But since Toryism in its Cameron mutation has become part of the progressive folly of the moment I can’t be sure what the future holds for me politically. 

I welcomed the Coalition government in 2010, not the best of all possible worlds, but the best we could get; at least the ministry was headed by a Conservative.  I was wrong; it’s headed by a worthless idiot, a mediocrity of the first degree, one whose personal politics are based on nothing but condescension, faddishness and guilt.  He even makes Louis Napoleon look good, which really is quite an achievement. 

So far as his wretched government is concerned I call to mind the words of Oliver Cromwell in dismissing the Long Parliament in 1653;

Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your God; which of you have not barter'd your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth? Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defil'd this sacred place, and turn'd the Lord's temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress'd, are yourselves gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors.

In the name of God, go! 

You see, now I’m in agreement with Karl Marx and Oliver Cromwell.  The world has been turned upside down!  Alas, this is what Cameron has driven me to.  

Cameron’s Gay Week

  

I no longer support the Conservative Party.  My goodness, I should really keep quiet about this; my family would be outraged!  That’s not quite true.  I know my late grandfather, a life-long Tory who once met Churchill, would be sad, but mother and father have, along with me, become increasingly disenchanted.  I will always vote for decent Tories like Boris Johnson, London’s mayor; I will not vote for a faux Tory like that hopeless muddle-head David Cameron, all windmills and gay marriage. 

I may in future support a Conservative Party, and that party is the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP).  I’m writing this in the wake of the parliamentary by-election in the middle England seat of Corby.  Formerly held for the Tories by the idiotic Louise Mensch – such a little mensch - , it was taken by Labour last Thursday with a comfortable swing.  You know the sort of thing – if this result was repeated across the country blah de blah de blah. 

I expected the Tories to lose, they deserved to lose, but the UKIP advance was a delight to behold, a warning, if you like, from Conservatives to the Cameroons.  Attracting over 5000 votes, some 14% of the poll, the party moved into third place behind the Tory candidate.  Even more gratifying, the pestilential Gay Liberation Front, also known as the Liberal Democrats, lost their deposit. 

It’s as well not to make too much of this sort of thing.  The boast that UKIP is now the ‘third party’ in English politics is premature in the extreme, in some ways as asinine as the ‘if this result were repeated’ mantra.  But it shows that the traditional support for the Conservative Party is in danger of haemorrhaging away to the right.  It shows just how sick and tired people are not just with the ghastly European Union but with Cameron and his feeble-minded politics.  His version of Conservatism is just another Gay Coalition Front. 

On the subject of which, I noted from a Spectator blog that Cameron is accused of misleading supporters over the possible loss of support the Conservatives would risk if the government legislated on gay marriage.  In responding to a letter by Cheryl Gillian, the former Welsh Secretary, deeply critical of the gay policy, Cameron claimed that polling data showed that it would make more people vote Conservative.  Oh, Mr Cameron, that’s a lie.  Sorry; I’m breaching parliamentary etiquette.  I should say it’s a terminological inexactitude. 

I hope you won’t mind a slight digression here but people might be interested to know that the forms of language that can be used in Parliamentary debate are governed by strict procedural rules.  It’s all rather quaint, the Speaker ruling if a particular member has crossed the boundaries or not.  Benjamin Disraeli, a former Tory leader then in opposition, was once instructed to withdraw his allegation that half the cabinet were knaves.  Half the cabinet are not knaves, came the response.

Anyway back to Cameron, who is not a knave, just a little confused.  Andrew Hawkins, director of ComRes, the company that carried out the poll, wrote to the Prime Minister correcting his terminological inexactitudes.  Amongst other things he said that “the more important point from the poll…shows both that the party loses more votes than it gains as a result of the policy, and that former Conservative voters are especially less likely to return to the fold.”

Hawkins went on to say that the policy would have a detrimental effect on the Conservative Party’s electoral fortunes if pursued – “your letter states that ‘all of the published polls have found that more voters support equal civil marriage – however described – than oppose it.’ That is simply not the case.”

It was such a gay week from Mister Cameron.  I don’t suppose he is feeling very gay at all just at the present.  

With a Whimper

In his end was his beginning.  We had plenty of warning about David Cameron, plenty of warning that he was the worst possible choice, a bad leader for the Conservative Party who has proved himself to be a bad leader for the country, weak and shifting, a rudderless sailing boat, drifting in whatever direction taken by the wind.  He is the hollow centre of a hollow government.

The auspices were there at the outset.  He declared himself the ‘heir to Blair’ in the 2005 leadership election.  That really should have finished him.  But by this time the Party was desperate for a winner and, by whatever perverse chemistry, the morally bankrupt and intellectually vacant Blair had won three elections in a row, an unprecedented record in the history of the Labour Party.  The Conservative Party, the natural party of government, seemed to be in fixed in unnatural opposition. Winning was all that mattered, and so the ‘heir to Blair’ it was.

But he could not manage even that much:  he did not win.  Even against that charmless old ogre Gordon Brown, even against a government marked by stunning levels of incompetence, even against a ministry that reached a nadir only to reach another, he could not win an outright victory.  With all the pointers in his favour he could only manage second best, a coalition with Liberal Democrats, a sort of political glee club, contemptible in their perpetual theory, even more contemptible in their present practice. A flawed mandate and a gay bargain; that was the best he could manage.

It was one flawed mandate built upon another, a mandate to ‘modernise’ the Conservative Party, or the ‘nasty party’, as the absurd Theresa May described it, measured against what I can’t be at all sure. Oh, yes, measured against Margaret Thatcher, measured against the most successful peace-time leader and Prime Minister in the party’s history.  Margaret Thatcher understood ordinary voters in a way that Cameron and May never will. 

Instead of clear policies on the economy, on home ownership, on privatisation, on trade union reform we have had a lot of metro-land political pap.  The ‘nasty party’ has become the ‘nice party’, all part of the Cameron modernisation drive, a sort of Chairman Dave Cultural Revolution that took in all the fashionable panaceas, a big tent, Big Society jamboree. 

The Conservative Party was to modernise by becoming something else, though lord alone knows what.  It was to move into ground occupied by tofu-eating, tree-hugging lefties.  No wonder his 2010 ‘victory’ was such a damp rag.  It even looked at one moment that Gordon Brown might hang on! 

It was all there, all on board, all the neo-Islington panaceas, whether it’s green energy, foreign aid, rainbow liberation or Dutch cyclists.  I guarantee not one Conservative voter in ten cares about the Big Society; not one person in ten understands what Cameron is about.   I will say this for him, though: he is the best recruiting agent the United Kingdom Independence Party never had.

Does he understand himself, this silly self-conscious old boy, terrified of being perceived of as an old boy, so much so that he could not even go to a wedding in proper attire, least the Bullingdon Bull escaped from the pen of his past. 

What a contrast he is with Boris Johnson, who wears his past lightly, with no apology and no retreat; and how we love him for it.  Yes, we love Boris, I love Boris.  Not that I hate Dave.  I think I probably feel as most other people do, Conservative or not – on the whole I’m indifferent to him.  He is in the worst possible twilight zone, neither positive nor negative, neither hated nor loved. 

Thinking hard about him there is a terrible littleness about the man.  He has no courage, he has no principles, he has no conviction, he has no ideas because, well, he has no idea.  He is simply 'the heir to Blair', a clone, a manqué who even brought us another ‘glorious’ episode of post-colonial noblesse oblige in Libya, with consequences that we can all see.  It’s a wonder that we are not also bogged down in Syria. 

Tim Yeo, a former minister, described Cameron’s heart “as an organ that remains impenetrable to most Britons.”  That, I suspect, is an exercise that most Britons would not care to undertake, a journey to the centre of nothingness.  Like his intellect and his character, it’s hollow. He is the Hollow Man.  This is the way his premiership will end, this is the way his premiership will end, this is the way that his premiership will end, not with a bang but a whimper.  

David Cameron: the little man who never was

Will the real David Cameron please stand up?  This is a question that is troubling an increasing number of supporters of the Conservative Party; it’s a question that troubles me.  Actually I begin to think that there is a more fundamental problem here, a major philosophical fallacy.  The question rather assumes there is a real David Cameron. 

I personally can think of at least half a dozen Camerons, each one as genuine or as phoney as the other.  There is simply no core or substance here, nothing.  Cameron might very well be the creation of some intelligence agency or other, the human centre of a new Operation Mincemeat, the Prime Minister who never was, washed up on the shores of this country. 

I voted Conservative in the last general election; I expected a Conservative victory.  After all, a dead dog, I reasoned, could surely beat Gordon Brown, a worthless Prime Minister, Mister Super Gaff, heading the most incompetent, most profligate administration in British history.  But Cameron was no dead dog: he didn’t win; he had to enter into a shabby compromise deal with the Liberal Democrats, the Brokeback Coalition. 

At the time I buried all doubts because at least we had a Conservative in Number Ten after so many depressing New Labour Years.  We were deceived; I was deceived.  I have no idea what Cameron is politically – does anyone? – but I know what he is not; he is not a conservative and he is not a Conservative.

He is, if you like, the Post-Thatcher Stress Prime Minister, the man who attempted to ‘detoxify’ the brand, to make the ‘nasty party’ the cuddly party for all seasons, left right, left right, whatever way the wind blows; no substance, no principles, nothing that could in any way be described as a ‘philosophy’ beyond a sort of bland Blairism. 

Oh, but there is a philosophy, if you can describe it as that, previously embraced by Cameron Man on the way to the Big Society.  The guru here is one Philip Blond, the so-called ‘Red Tory’ who heads a think tank called ResPublica.  Mr Blond, a sartorial and political disaster area, is a sort of Trot of the right, full of big ideas that are really quite pathetic in their littleness.  I wrote about Blond ambition months before the election of 2010, concluding that;

Power brings its own demands, its own responsibilities. It’s best to be practical about these matters, not to be caught in a snare of tiresome ideas and empty programmes. Red Toryism is no Toryism. It’s the politics of the circus, the thinking of the second rate. Be pragmatic, be realistic are the two guiding ideas David should take into government. All else will follow. 

But Cameron in government was neither pragmatic nor realistic; Cameron in government is even blander than Blond.  In a way he and Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, are the perfect match.  I get to the point where I simply can’t tell the difference between these two identikit politicians; the one seems to blend effortlessly into the other.  The odd thing is that after two years in power, with things going from worse to worse still, people by and large don’t hate Cameron; they are indifferent to him.  For a major politician is there anything worse? 

Then there is Boris Johnson, one of my heroes.  What price Boris?  It’s the same question that was once asked of Churchill, a question that’s increasingly beginning to demand an answer.  Apparently the Cameron camp are so worried by the Irresistible Rise of Big Boris that a whispering campaign is underway – “If the answer is Boris, it’s some question”, the theme goes.  Yes it is some question, and it’s simply stated – David Cameron?

There are only two things wrong with this hapless man: everything he says and everything he does.  Take his absurd A-List of potential Members of Parliament, people who were parachuted into constituencies no matter what the local feelings were, forms of patronage that were all part of Cameron’s modernisation project, the bland for the bland. 

Commenting on the recent resignation of Louise Mensch, the MP for Corby, Charles Moore in the Spectator points out the dangers of this Whiggish approach to political patronage.  There was no need for this silly woman to write a ‘letter of resignation’ to the Prime Minister.  She is not in government and thus the resignation is purely a matter between her and her local constituency party.  The ‘resignation’ was born of pique, no more.  She clearly expected a share of the glittering prizes, largesse from her patron.  Being an MP is simply not enough.  Other such resignations may follow as the A-list slips down the alphabet. 

Cameron is not enough; he will never be enough.  He is too self-conscious, absurdly afraid to be seen in tails in case he is branded a ‘toff’; absurdly afraid of embracing a right-wing idea in case he is branded a Tory rather than his preferred designation as the heir to Blair. 

There are so many things that ordinary voters expected of this government, solutions for the big issues of the day, whether it be a reduction of Labour’s massive public debt, the general state of the economy, the growing intrusiveness of the European Union and the problem of mass immigration.  What did we get beyond Osborne’s disastrous budget?  Why, burning issues like gay marriage and House of Lords reform, the sort of thing that keeps ordinary people awake into the night.

Here, let me give you a few wise words;

Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream. We have failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong. We have even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run counter to our values.

Who said that, do you think?  Was it Aiden Burley, perhaps, an amplification of his recent and wholly justified criticism of the ghastly Olympic opening spectacle?  No, it was Cameron, speaking in Munich in February 2111, though one would never guess, as he joined with John Prescott and the other mob in rubbishing Burley’s heterodoxy. 

Cameron, Mr Two Face, Janus-like looking both ways, except two faces and two directions is not nearly enough for this man, who looks all ways and none, who does not know if he is coming, going, or at some point in between,. He is not a bad Prime Minister like Blair and Brown; he does not even have that merit.  He is, rather, the Nothing Prime Minister, the vacuum at the centre of British government, the vacuum at the centre of the Tory Party.

Yesterday upon the stair

I met a man who wasn’t there

He wasn’t there again today

Oh, how I wish he’d go away

When I came home last night at three

The man was waiting there for me

But when I looked around the hall

I couldn’t see him there at all!

Go away, go away, don’t you come back any more!

Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door

Last night I saw upon the stair

A little man who wasn’t there

He wasn’t there again today

Oh, how I wish he’d go away

Loving the Blonde Beast

When I was eighteen I wrote to Boris Johnson, the present mayor of London.  He was then shadow Minister of the Arts in the front bench team of Michael Howard, the Conservative Leader of the Opposition.  

Johnson was also at the time the editor of the Spectator, a weekly political magazine that I’ve been reading since my early schooldays.  It was on his watch that an editorial appeared criticising the people of Liverpool for displays of ‘mawkish sentimentality’ over the death in Iraq of a prominent local figure.  They were also accused of wallowing in a ‘vicarious victimhood.’  Howard, in overreacting to the ensuing squeals of protest, ordered Johnson to make a personal pilgrimage to Liverpool, draped in metaphorical sackcloth and ashes, offering a humiliating public apology. 

It all seemed so ludicrous to me.  In my letter I said that it called to mind the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV, who had to journey to the fortress of Canossa in northern Italy, there to abase himself before Pope Gregory VII. Poor Emperor Boris; he had ‘nach Canossa gehen.’ 

I didn’t really expect a response; it was just a minor gesture of solidarity.  I got one, though, a lovely and thoughtful letter thanking me for my understanding.  Up to that point I had admired him as a politician and as a writer, as well as for his endearing appearances on Have I Got News for You, a BBC comedy cum news quiz.  Ever since I’ve adored the blonde beast! 

This coming Thursday, 3 May, he is standing for re-election in the London mayoral contest, with Ken Livingstone, the former Labour incumbent, the main challenger.  I loath Livingstone, a sleazy, self-regarding and unpleasant little man, a friend of backward Muslim clerics, which is reason enough to support Boris.  But setting the negativity to one side, there are so many solid reasons why BJ is the man for London.  I’ll come on to these in a bit but first ecce homo – look at the man and the enormous difficulties he faces.

I have no doubt that Boris is not just the most important Conservative in London but in Britain as a whole.  As David Cameron’s star wanes Boris’s waxes.  Though not in the government, he has a recognition factor that most front bench ministers would envy.  He’s also hugely popular and I have little doubt that in normal circumstances he would be a shoo-in on Thursday.  But these are not normal circumstances; Boris is swimming against the tide. Shifty Ken has one major advantage; Cameron and George Osborne, the Chancellor, have been batting on his side.

With the present government it’s been disaster after disaster, not least with Osborne’s botched budget.  With the tide of opinion moving heavily against the Conservatives, Boris may drown in an electoral tsunami; he may go under in a deluge of political factors over which he has no control.  The copy gets worse day by day.  No sooner had the government announced that it had loaned a further £10billion to the IMF than even deeper cuts in domestic spending were revealed. With friends like these who the hell needs enemies? 

Writing in the latest issue of the Spectator Fraser Nelson reminds us just exactly what Boris has done for London and Londoners.  His 8000 ‘Boris bikes’ have been taken on no fewer than ten million rides.  Altogether the city is a much more cyclist-friendly place than it was when I was in my teens (I never dreamed then of negotiating the many hazards on my bike!).  Under the watchful eye of our dear Gauleiter there has been a ten per cent reduction in street crime.  The Greater London Authority Tax has been frozen, saving the average Londoner a cumulative £445.  Boris has pledged to reduce it by a further ten per cent if re-elected.  All this and Boris bikes; what more could one ask for?!  

But, as I say, he is swimming against a particularly strong current.  With George Galloway, Britain’s number one Islamist, out campaigning for Livingstone, it’s clear that there is a cynical attempt to play the Muslim card in the same fashion as the recent Bradford East by-election. 

Nelson concludes his piece as follows;

The Mayor matters because he represents a certain strand of Conservatism, unashamed about Tory principles and unafraid of making unpopular arguments. His Toryism is one of tax cuts, standing up for British bankers and defying the European Union when it threatens our prosperity. Boris embodies the rejection of the Blair/Clinton ‘triangulation’ politics, where the least offensive politician is deemed the most successful.

This election was always about more than just London. It is about how we do politics, who fights and who wins. Over the last 20 years, our politics has been reduced into a battle for swing voters in swing seats. This has led our political class in a certain direction, directed by the sat-navs of the opinion polls and focus groups. Boris has defiantly set off in another direction, guided by instinct and brio. And this is why his victory matters so much.

Indeed it does.  I’m campaigning for Boris; I’m persuading as many people as I can to support Boris; I shall be voting on Thursday for Boris.  You see, I love Boris, just as I love London.  

Iron in the Soul

There is one compelling reason to see The Iron Lady – Meryl Streep’s performance as Margaret Thatcher. This is not acting; it’s almost as if an uncanny doppelganger has come to life, a performance which seems to clone the real-life Thatcher; her speech patterns, her mannerisms, her movements, her gestures; a fine observation of the finest details. This really is iron. The movie itself, though, is a little more like wood.

I have no hesitation at all in saying that Margaret Thatcher only stands comparison with Oliver Cromwell as the greatest commoner in British history. When people like Ted Heath, her immediate predecessor as leader of the Conservative Party, and John Major, her immediate successor, are long forgotten, her legacy will continue to inspire and divide. She will continue to be loved and hated: a Roundhead for the Cavaliers, a Cavalier for the Roundheads; there can be no indifference here.

Given that the subject is still alive, The Iron Lady, directed by Phyllida Lloyd, was always going to be a controversial film, all the more controversial because there is a strong focus on the alleged effects of Baroness Thatcher’s dementia. As a plotting device it works, at least up to a point, focusing in and out of the key events in her remarkable life. But the state of her mental health takes far, far too much time, crowding out so much of greater significance.

It’s a sympathetic portrait, certainly; it humanises a woman that so many have demonised, but it really casts her achievements somewhat into the shadows. The highlights are all there but presented in a rather shallow, episodic fashion, sung out, if you like, as political karaoke, appropriate enough, as Lloyd’s only other movie was the smash hit Mamma Mia.

The narrative is also rather confusing, events not coming in sequence. Moreover, Thatcher’s observation that a woman would never be Prime Minister in her lifetime was made in 1970, not after she became leader of the Conservative Party, when it stood to reason that a woman was likely to become Prime Minister if she managed to win a general election!

In so many ways The Iron Lady is more of a personal odyssey, the Journey of the Grocer’s Daughter, from hopeful dawn to sad twilight. As a biopic it simply does not stand comparison with Oliver Stone’s Nixon, which managed to humanise another controversial figure without skimping on the political substance. It’s also too ambitious in scope, far less focused than The Queen.

As a movie it’s really more about aging and loss than anything else, and it might be best appreciated on that level. It managed to beguile and infuriate me by turns; beguile because of the sympathetic intimacy; infuriate because I wanted so much more, wanted to understand just what motivated her to act and believe as she did. I simply got no proper sense of the real Thatcher, the woman within the politician, the politician within the woman.

The play on Alzheimer’s reminded me of Iris, the 2001 biopic on the life of the writer Iris Murdoch, all the more so as Jim Broadbent reprises his role as supportive partner in the midst of decline. In The Iron Lady he is there as Denis, Baroness Thatcher’s husband, except that he is not there at all, merely a ghostly companion in her own demented mind, the only person with whom she continues to share intimacies. Broadbent’s performance is dryly amusing, though perhaps a little too much of the amiable buffoon.

The flashbacks take us to Grantham and the early days of then Margaret Roberts, full of wide-eyed admiration for Alfred (Iain Glen), her grocer-come-politician father, a living representative of the kind of solid, unassuming virtues that made England the greatest nation of shopkeepers in history. Young Margaret is played by Alexandra Roach, another wonderful performance, second only to that of Streep. In what I thought the best scene in the movie we see her from above, freshly elected to Parliament in 1959, a flash of young and feminine blue in the midst of middle-aged masculine grey.

There are two other performances I would flag up, that of Anthony Head as Geoffrey Howe, Baroness Thatcher’s onetime cabinet colleague and eventual political assassin, and Olivia Colman, who plays her daughter Carol with affection and devotion, receiving little in return from a mother who is too self-absorbed, a mother who clearly prefers Mark, her distant, and absent, son.

Still, with all of the wooden inadequacies, I came away from The Iron Lady with an even greater sense of affection for the best British peace-time Prime Minister; a woman who was tried time and again and not found wanting; a woman who had the guts and determination to see things through; a woman who had the courage to tackle fascist thugs, trade union bullies and European bureaucrats - enemies without and within - when nobody else did, certainly not the dead sheep and appeasers with whom she was obliged to share office. Her betrayal in the end was the shabbiest act in Conservative Party history, a political assassination from which it has taken two decades to recover.

A Party for All Seasons

“There is properly no history; only biography,” so wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. Robin Harris in The Conservatives: A History has remained true to this dictum, writing what is in effect a biography of the Conservative Party. Thomas Carlyle would have approved, inasmuch as it is an account of the great, and not so great, who have made their mark on one of the most remarkable and enduring political associations in history.

It’s a commendable piece of work, at once scholarly detached and polemically engaged, written by a man who is better qualified than most for the task, both as a historian and as a political insider. The author of an elegant biography of the French statesman Talleyrand, Dr Harris is a former Director of the Conservative Research Department, during which time he acted as Margaret Thatcher’s special adviser and speech writer. He is presently writing a biography of the former Prime Minister, to be published after her death.

It’s a slippery beast, the Conservative Party, almost impossible to define in terms of a core philosophy, anything beyond conservatism, that is, a reverence for established tradition and a suspicion of novelty. Disraeli famously said that England does not love coalitions but the Tories themselves are a kind of coalition of different interests, with the pattern shifting and changing over time. The truly remarkable thing is that what began as an alliance of rural aristocrats, ranged behind the crown, ended as party of the urban middle-classes; from Bolingbroke to Thatcher in several remarkable steps!

The Tory Party is a chameleon; it always has been, paradoxically committed to the way things are yet capable of quite revolutionary adaptations, unlike its great rival the Whigs, once the strongest contenders for the future, now cast well into the past. This is not because it represents some noble and enduring principle, no; it’s simply because it is a pragmatic force built for one thing and one thing alone – to win elections.

In his introduction Harris quotes from the resignation letter of James Purnell, a former Work and Pensions Secretary, sent to Gordon Brown, the then Prime Minister, full of all sorts of risible and mawkish sentiments in reverence of the Labour Party – “We both love the Labour Party...We know we owe it everything and it owes us nothing.” Harris’ comment on this is telling;

No Conservative politician at any stage of the party's history would have written such a letter. No one has ever pretended to "love" the Conservative Party. It is doubtful that even the most sentimental backbench MP would have claimed to "owe" the party "everything". Any serious Tory figure adopting such a pose would incur immediate ridicule. The Conservative Party exists, has always existed and can only exist to acquire and exercise power, albeit on a particular set of terms. It does not exist to be loved, hated or even respected. It is no better or worse than the people who combine to make it up. It is an institution with a purpose, not an organism with a soul.

Harris traces the origins of this ‘institution with a purpose’ back to the great constitutional and religious struggles of the seventeenth century, coming to a head in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The Tories were the High Church Party, the party of insiders which, time and again, adopted outsiders as mentors and guides. Evolution and adaptation, that’s the key to a party that was Tory and then Conservative and then Unionist and then Conservative again.

The intellectual foundation of the modern party was laid, irony of ironies, by Edmund Burke, an Irishman, a Catholic-sympathiser and a Whig! Burke reacted against the horrors that followed in the wake of the French Revolution. So, too, from the ministry of Pitt the Younger onwards, did the Tories, reacting against the forms of abstract thought and utopian politics that had brought it on.

But reacting did not invariably mean reaction; it meant embracing change when change was unavoidable, often turning it to conservative ends. After all, it was the Tories, the High Church Party, who introduced Catholic emancipation; it was the Tories, the Party of the Landed Interest, who repealed the Corn Laws. It was the Tories who began by opposing extensions to the franchise only to extend it right down to the urban working classes. In Salisbury, the pessimistic aristocrat who hated the idea of democracy, they had a leader who created ‘villa Conservatism’, making the party a home for the new middle classes, a process from which so much electoral benefit was to be drawn in the course of the following century.

It was the Conservatives, the religiously orthodox, who were so brilliantly led by a converted Jew. It was the Conservatives, outwardly the most ‘sexist’ of all parties, who were to be the first to elect a woman as leader, a woman who went on to become the country’s most revolutionary Prime Minster. Paradox, hard upon irony, hard upon paradox – that’s the story of the Tories.

Harris writes with such brilliant insight. His is a story of personalities, each shaping the party in their own image. I’ve long taken the view that Disraeli’s vicious attacks on Sir Robert Peel after the repeal of the Corn Laws was born of ambition rather than principle, but Harris persuasively argued that Peel had been a bad leader, too remote from his party. To make one major change of direction without consultation – that over Catholic Emancipation - , is a misfortune; to make a second one – that over the Corn Laws – looks like carelessness. The comparison here is surely with Ted Heath, another remote and ill-omened leader.

The author has penetrating things to say about all of the party’s leaders. He’s particularly good on Disraeli, an organisational and political genius whose credentials as a reformer have been hugely exaggerated by posterity. His overriding concern, rather, was for the monarchy, the landed interest and national prestige. His zeal was for the greatness of England, as Salisbury, his successor as party leader, put it in a posthumous tribute.

Disraeli along with Salisbury, the longest serving Tory Premier, and Margaret Thatcher constitutes the author’s triumvirate of greats, a contention with which I have no argument. Winston Churchill, I also agree, is a case sui generis, a political maverick, whose reputation was surely only saved by Hitler! Party meant little to him, even less in the context of his wartime Cabinet, and on so many issues he was just as ‘unsound’ as Lord Randolph, his brilliant but mercurial father, too full of greatness, or a perception of greatness, for his own good.

I also agree with his lows, particularly his assessment of Harold Macmillan, the grossly overrated ‘Supermac’, whose irresponsible economic and social policies were to create a poisonous legacy for the party and the country. Disraeli famously said of Peel that he caught the Whigs bathing and walked away with their clothes. The same might be said of Macmillan, only in his case the clothes were those of the Labour Party. Harris writes of him;

By some definitions, and by analogy with Disraeli, he could just about count as a Tory. But, by no known definition was he philosophically speaking a conservative. This, through his legacy to the Conservative Party, was a problem – nor necessarily one that is extinct.

Indeed.

I love the author’s style, his liberal peppering of waspish and mordant wit. Some barbs made me giggle, particularly that delivered at Arthur Balfour, who succeeded Salisbury, his uncle, as party leader and Prime Minister. Balfour said that the Carlton Club, one of the well-springs of modern Conservatism, was a ‘beastly’ place, infested with political bores. Harris writes “When Balfour, or any other Conservative leader, lost the bores, he lost the party.” Similarly his verdict on Stanley Baldwin, the inter-war face of what I think of as Ostrich Conservatism, is absolutely spot on;

Baldwin won huge majorities. He just did not know what to do with them. At a deeper level, undoubtedly he reflected the mood of the times. This, in fact, was the problem. He reflected it too well. In Baldwin the country got what it wanted and, arguably, to stray into more disputed territory, it got what it deserved. But it did not get what it needed.

I wrote at the outset that The Conservatives is both a work of scholarly detachment and polemical engagement, the polemical element becoming ever more obvious as we move towards the present day. The final chapter is headed Cameron’s Party?, with a question mark that does not speak so much as shout! History’s judgement on David Cameron is indeed open – is he Peel or is he Heath or is he still the ‘heir to Blair’? We shall see.

The author is generally fair (his brickbats are thrown elsewhere), though I share his scepticism over the present modernising project, over what John O’Sullivan, writing in the National Review and elsewhere, describes as the “Dianification of Toryism”, promoting all sorts of trendy causes that no ordinary Tory voter gives a damn about. Conservatives will never win elections by pretending to be liberals.

The final paragraph of the final chapter simply soars;

Disraeli, the Jewish outsider who championed traditional institutions, Salisbury, the fastidious aristocrat who won over the bourgeoisie, and Thatcher, the woman who crushed the unions, the Argentinean Junta and most of the Cabinet, and restored the economy to health, are all, in their different ways, completely surprising. It matters to the country that the Conservative Party should retain its capacity to produce surprises, and so harness the eccentric, distinctive qualities of British national greatness.

This is an entertaining, engaging and lively book with so many highs. That only makes the occasional lows all the more irritating. For example, Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, the fifth Marquis of Landsdowne, who succeeded Salisbury as Foreign Secretary in 1900 (hitherto he had held this post in conjunction with that of Prime Minister), is never properly introduced, with the result that the index, presumably compiled by someone other than the author, conflates him with his grandfather, the third Marquis, a leading Whig politician.

Similarly, when Salisbury resigned from the premiership in July 1902 the author writes that “the Queen took Salisbury’s advice and asked his nephew [Balfour] to head the government.” Can this be Alexandra, wife of Edward VII and queen consort? Edward was indisposed at the time, ill in the aftermath of peritonitis, so I suppose it might have been Alexandra, though I wasn’t aware that consorts had that constitutional authority. It certainly can’t be Victoria, the only other Queen referred to up to this point, who died over a year before!

Once again this is me reading with the eye of an academic, ever attentive to detail, no matter how petty. Set against the overall value of a book that is bound to serve as a standard modern introduction to the history of the Conservative Party it’s of little substance, mole hills beside a mountain.

No stomach to this fight

I voted Conservative in the general election of 2010. It wasn’t the first time I voted; no, that was in the election of 2005, just before my nineteenth birthday, full of passionate hatred for the warmongering Labour government of Tony Blair, full of hatred for any form of hard Labour, old or new. The outcome was a sad disappointment.

I was disappointed in 2010 also, disappointed that David Cameron had not won an outright victory. It was tempered with some pleasure that we had a kind of Conservative government but concerned that it had to be diluted by a bargain with the ghastly Liberal Democrats, the know nothing, do nothing party; the yellow party.

Now I’ve had enough; I’ve had enough of Cameron, this ‘heir to Blair.’ Actually he’s turning out to be part Blair – foreign war is quite the thing – and part Grocer Heath, Mr U-turn himself, the man who sold this country to Europe, the act of a political Judas. Cameron, too, is betraying the country in his abject cowardice towards Europe, something I’ll come to a bit later. First I want to say a word or two about Clegg and his gang, the tail wagging the Cameron dog.

No decent Conservative should put up with these people. They got a bloody nose in May, both in the local elections and in the Alternative Vote referendum. Hardly anybody wants them, this wretched party that belongs neither here nor there, neither of the left nor the right, but a soggy middle. If we had an election now I’m convinced that we would have another and more complete Strange Death of Liberal England, a prospect I wholeheartedly welcome.

Yes, they lost and ever since they’ve been desperate to ‘get it up’, to demonstrate a more ‘muscular’ Liberalism, with that grumpy old ass Vince Cable, a political Victor Meldrew, breaking solidarity that in the past would led to swift ejection from office. But he wants to moan from the comfort of a ministerial car.

Now Clegg and his gang are crowing about their ‘victory’ in making a mockery of the proposed reforms in the National Health Service. Paddy Ashdown, also known as Paddy Pants Down, a reference to past sexual shenanigans, says that Clegg, his fag, ‘played a blinder on this.’ Oh, in case of any misunderstanding here I should add that a ‘fag’ in this context does not mean what you may think it means. No, it’s the old practice in public schools of the younger boys acting as servants for the seniors!

So Cameron is made to look like a fool by these school boyish pranks, this laughable one-upmanship by Fag Clegg. He has little if any room for manoeuvre because his trick circus is all based on balance, the Limp Dumbs having marked out their pissing territory. This includes Energy and Climate Change, presided over by Chris Huhne, otherwise Windmill Man or Mister Hypothermia, who is likely to turn out to be one of the greatest mass murders of old people in history.

But let’s pretend that Paddy Pants Down, Vince ‘I don’t believe it’ Cable, Clegg the Fag Boy and Hypothermia Huhne are all a bad dream, that David Cameron won outright last year, as he should have against one of the most incompetent governments in history. Let’s pretend there is a Tory majority, dedicated to cutting the worst deficit we have ever accumulated.

What then? Drastic savings, a more realistic appreciation of our diminished role in the world? No, of course not: let’s bomb Libya, let’s waste more money, money we are being told we don’t have, on a futile foreign war. That’s the Blair way, after all. Oh, I almost forgot - let’s ensure that charity begins everywhere but home by ring-fencing the foreign aid budget.

The Heath way, the other Cameron route, is on Europe. There was an excellent letter in the Sunday Telegraph from one Charles Bell, pointing out the Prime Minister’s multiple failings on Europe. While an ever increasing burden is being placed on tax payers, no attempt has been made to reduce our contributions to the profligate European Union. No, pensioners will freeze this winter, unable to pay energy bills inflated by green taxes, while Herman van Rumpay, the risible Mister Euro Smurf, the make-pretend President, and Manuel Barroso, the other President, jet around the place in separate crafts because they are too jealous of each other to share!

Cameron has done nothing, moreover, to reclaim our legal sovereignty, lost with the wholesale digestion of the Human Rights Act. We can’t deport foreign-born criminals because they ‘have a right to a family life’ here, as defined by the Act and as interpreted by the courts. Bit by bit our sovereignty dies while Cameron only has time to stand and stare.

Oh, but he can’t clear out the nonsense of human rights legislation because the Limp Dumbs would not like it, which brings me back to my essential point: this Coalition is a liability, it makes Cameron look more ridiculous by the day, makes the Conservative Party look inept, cursed with the awful Liberal albatross.

Now is the time to go for a general election: Labour looks more hopeless than ever under Ed Millipede and the Liberal Democrats will suffer a political Armageddon. But Cameron, I regret to say, has no stomach to this fight. I can only wish that he would depart. I would personally make out his passport and put crowns for convoy into his purse.

A modern Boadicea

This is another of the essays I wrote for a multi-author site not long after I finished reading a biography of Edward Heath, prime minister of Britain in the early 1970s, a fairly disastrous time in our history. I think it worth preserving here, especially in the light of our present circumstances.

Having read Edward Heath-the Authorised Biography I could do with a jolly good antidote; I could do with Margaret Thatcher – the Authorised Biography. The commission was given some years ago to Charles Moore, one of my favourite columnists, and I suspect the exercise is largely complete.

There is only one small problem – it’s not scheduled for publication until after her death, something I would not advance, or wish to see advanced, by a single degree. The longer this great and wonderful lady is with us the better.

Looking back over the history of Britain since 1945 I see Margaret Thatcher standing like a political colossus, a refreshing contrast to every other prime minister, and I do not exempt Winston Churchill, whose peacetime ministry was little better than a disappointing postscript to his wartime days.

Reading the reviews of a newly published biography of Charles de Gaulle oddly enough it was Thatcher he brought to mind, because I think she occupies an analogous position in British history to his in the history of France.

Think about it; think about the position of our country in 1979. We hadn’t been defeated in war, that’s true, but objectively speaking we may very well have been, judging by the political and economic condition of the nation. Inflation was out of control; trade union barons, like medieval condottieri, were in the habit of marching in to Downing Street to dictate terms, the whole social fabric of the nation was in danger of unravelling in the face of continual political mismanagement, appalling under Labour, not that much better under some Conservative administrations.

The rot goes back to 1945. The nation was bankrupt; there needed to be a major period of economic retrenchment and renewal. Instead our capital was frittered away on ruinous welfare programmes, things we simply could not afford. So, our major competitors, who did not make the same mistake, had a march on us. The Germans emerged stronger in defeat than we had in victory. We had won the war only to lose the peace, a cliché, I know, but one that sums up the ensuing period so well.

By the time Labour left office in 1951 the damage had been done. A new orthodoxy emerged that welfarism and the mixed economy was a ‘good thing’, an orthodoxy that was to go by the name of Butskellism, combining the names of Rab Butler, a Tory Chancellor, with Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour Party prior to Harold Wilson. Perhaps if Churchill had been in the vigour of life, perhaps if he had taken a greater interest in domestic economic management rather than foreign affairs, things might have been different. Unfortunately they were not.

Then came the age of the two Harolds, MacMillan and Wilson, a time when Butskellism reached its high tide, a bogus age, a dishonest age when underlying problems were simply ignored, problems like the ever increasing rate of inflation and poor productivity, only disguised by a favourable international situation. The whole illusion was sustained by the hocus-pocus of Keynesian economics, the belief that the state can regulate the economy for the benefit of all, forever, and ever, and ever. Well, it can’t.

For a time it looked as if Heath was set to change direction, to break this dreadful consensus, on the basis of the Selsdon Programme, but he turned out to be worse even than the Harolds; he turned out to be the greatest exponent of state management ever; the greatest socialist who was not a socialist.

By 1979 the lies and deceptions that had sustained the country through the previous three decades could no longer be ignored. What was needed was a revolution in economic and social policy; what was needed was a revolutionary; what was needed was Margaret Thatcher.

She swept away all of the illusions of the past, the thing I admire most about her. She was as courageous in the face of adversity, often coming from within her own party, as Heath was cowardly. She was no theoretician but her common-sense approach to economic questions harmonised very well with monetarism. Her belief in markets over the state gave new life to the economy. She broke the power of the union condottieri, broke the power of the enemy within as she broke the power of the enemy without. Once again Britain had standing in the world after years of declining prestige.

For all these reasons and more I believe her to be the greatest living Englishwoman, greater, by far, than all her male contemporaries. Her legacy will shine far into the future.

Iron Chancellor

Imagine yourself lost, somewhere in rural England. You are on your way to London; your sat nav has broken down, and you are on a minor road without signs. The only way of getting back on course is to stop and ask one of the passing locals. A man approaches on a bike; you wind down your window. "London", he repeats, with a thoughtful expression on his face, "Sorry, you won't get to it from here."

This came to mind as I reflected on the panicked reactions in the aftermath of last week's spending review, in which George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced £81billion in cuts in government spending. It was a bold move, an absolutely necessary move to deal with the massive hole in the public finances left by the fiscal irresponsibility of the previous administration, so bad it comes close, at least in my estimation, to being criminal.

Cuts are necessary; most people agree on that; even the Labour opposition agrees on that...at least I think they do. Alan Johnson, the Shadow Chancellor, better known to his many friends, including me, as Postman Pat, is a little bit lost when it comes to economic matters, rather a liability, given his brief. Cuts are necessary, just not now; it's not the right time. But as Norman Lamont, a former Chancellor, says in today's Sunday Telegraph, now is never the right time.

I'm a Tory, a particularly proud admission. I come from a family with a deep tradition in the Conservative Party. I wobbled slightly in my mid-teens, when, much to mother and father's horror, I formed an attachment to a chap with links to the Socialist Worker's Party or some such organisation; but that lasted all of about three weeks before the pendulum swung back to its natural stasis! I don't think I've ever been prouder to call myself a Tory than now, don't think I've ever been prouder of a politician than I am of George Osborne, whom I believe is the coming man, the man to watch, the man of the future. My admiration for our present Coalition between the Tories and the Liberal Democrats has also increased tremendously, set to become one of the most politically significant marriages in British history.

It was not always thus. I was disappointed and angered by the outcome of the General Election earlier this year, which saw the Conservatives emerge as the strongest party but still short of an overall majority, and that after the worst (no qualifications here; not one of the worst) administration in British history. I was convinced that the emerging coalition, the deal between David Cameron, the Conservative leader and now Prime Minister, and Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats and now Deputy Prime Minister, had a limited life; that there was bound to be another election within a year. I no longer believe this to be so; I think the coalition will last for the duration of the Parliament. The marvellous thing is that it's not weak, not tied by shifty and evasive compromises. No, the spending review has shown that it is willing to accept the tough decisions, willing to accept temporary unpopularity in pursuit of the greater good.

But the driving force is George Osborne; he is the one to recognise how necessary this fiscal realism is before this country sank altogether in the rising floods of debt. The overgrown state, nurtured by Labour, will be tackled at source in a major cutback which will see the loss of some half a million jobs in four years. Foul, cry the unions, foul cry their bloated communist bosses: this is unfair, an attack on 'working' people. Oh but how mild it is compared to Cuba, a country they so admire, that is proposing to cut half a million state-sector jobs in six months, and that only as a first stage. That's the way to do it, comrades.

Yes, here is where we are, but how gentle, how realistic the Osborne cuts are. It's as well to remember that £81billion is a mere two years of interest payments on our current levels of debt. Postman Pat predicts disaster, the dreaded 'double dip' recession, but the Osborne squeeze will only reduce public spending from 48% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to 41% by 2014-15, still above the post-war average for this country. Spending, in other words, will fall to the same proportion of GDP as in 2007-8, the point when Mad Gordon Brown, then Chancellor, set out to prove that the economy was not based on boom and bust but bust and bust. Despite all of the dire warnings from the ghastly official opposition, at the the end of the of Osborne's four year cycle the government will still be spending more in real terms than when Labour came to power in 1997.

Yes, Osborne is my hero. I will only venture one small criticism. The tough decisions have been taken; the Guardian state will be pruned right back, the state where the most fatuous and unnecessary 'jobs n services' were created, a forest canopy that choked the life out of the real economy, the productive economy. Killing sacred cows, that's what Tories do best, not being in thrall to some past practice or favoured idea. Taking tough decisions inevitably means courting unpopularity. But some shibboleths still remain. The pledge to protect the National Health Service from cuts, made during the election, has been maintained. This, I believe, is a gross error for the reason that the NHS budget grew extravagantly under the previous administration, that it is an enormous waste of national resources at a time when we cannot afford such waste. This monster now accounts for a fifth of government spending, riper for cuts than any other government department. The same goes for special concessions to the elderly, who will continue to be given certain financial privileges, like free bus passes, whether they need them or not. Such provision, like the welfare budget in general, should be rigorously means tested. As The Economist quite rightly says, under the previous administration the state became more of a comfort blanket than a safety net.

I'm continually tempted to say that this government is rapidly shaping up to be one of the best Tory administrations in post-war history, perhaps even the best, better even than that of Margaret Thatcher, and that’s saying something! But it's not a Tory administration, it's a coalition. I think we are being protected to some degree, protected from the full truth about the public finances. How else does one explain the Liberal Democrat adherence to a policy of financial realism that goes against the happy-clappy politics they have pursued hitherto?

This is the road we have to take. These cuts, I believe, are only the beginning, an absolutely necessary way of ending the dreadful lie that prosperity can be built by borrowing and credit; it can't. As Lamont says, prosperity, real prosperity, has to be earned, not borrowed. Yes, there is a gamble here, but a necessary gamble. It's to be hoped that the British people, in a deeply rooted entrepreneurial spirit, will rise to the challenge, not descend into mass hysteria, like the French, or murderous mass hysteria, like the Greeks. Coming from nowhere, never before having held senior public office, George Osborne is shaping up as a great politician and a great Chancellor. Yes, I'm proud to be a Tory.