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. 

Whistling Dixie

Barack Obama has seen fit to lecture us benighted Brits on the value of the European Union.  I have only one observation: I do so wish that he would stick to his own Union and not ours.  Does he not have troubles enough on his doorstep?  Perhaps he might care for a few helpful tips on managing his own affairs?  Would he welcome such a thing?  I rather think not.

He's a bit worried, you see, by Prime Minister David Cameron’s proposed in out referendum on British membership of our less perfect Union.  His administration has gone so far as to ‘warn’ (good word) our government against secession.  Has Obama, by chance, started to wear a stove pipe hat?  There he is, hoping that the mystic chords of memory will swell as they are touched by the better angels of our nature, that and a word or two from him.

My mystic chords are starting to hum.  I’m a secessionist; I want the bells of Charleston...sorry, London, to toll that day when we are once again free as a nation.  I want to be the first to fire on Fort Sumter, now conveniently located in Brussels.  The better angels of my nature tell me that the European Union is an affront to liberty, an affront to everything this nation stands for; an affront, for that matter, to everything America once stood for.  Quite frankly I can’t stand it; I can’t stand the bureaucrats and apparatchiks, the foreigners who exercise more control over our destiny than our own Parliament.  If Obama thinks it is possible to fool all of the people all of the time then he is wrong. 

But he can stand it, sitting in Washington, knowing not the first thing about this country or Europe.  Apparently he has raised the issue personally with Cameron.  A strong Britain in a strong Europe is in “America’s national interest.”  Oh, really? Well, then, let me return the favour – “Mister President, it is in the British national interest for a strong America remains a member of the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA.)”  Now, just imagine the reaction to that!

Obama’s earnest desire that the British people are not allowed a vote on their future, just in case that such a vote proves contrary to the ‘American interest’, has a long history in his administration.  Three years ago Vice President Joe Biden (what a perfect foil against presidential assassination he is) visited Brussels, ludicrously describing the place as “the capital of the free world” and the European Parliament as the “bastion of European democracy.”  He went on to compare it with the US Congress.  To that I say he understands little about his own political process and nothing at all about ours.

But, please, please witter on, Joe.  As Neil Gardiner noted in the Telegraph, Obama and Biden’s views on Europe “are as relevant to British voters as the futile ranting of Herman Van Rompuy or Jose Manuel Barroso, and will only serve to reinforce the determination of millions of Britons to throw off the shackles of Brussels.”  If that’s the case then they are to be welcomed! 

American liberals, so I believe, think that the EU is a jolly good thing, a beacon of benevolence, an icon of peace, fairness and equality, as Lionel Shirver ironically observed in the latest issue of Standpoint.  Criticising the EU, she goes on to say, is like “drawing horns on Nelson Mandela, or making lewd thrusting hand gestures at Aung San Suu Kyi.” 

Do they know, do you know, what incorporation in this Union actually means?  Well, let me tell you this – the Southern Confederates of 1860 and 1861 had not a fraction of our grievances.  Let’s play a game, one which may help to focus things just a shade or two better.  Just imagine if the United States was part of a super national Conglomerate, incorporating both North and South America.  Just imagine the capital of this Conglomerate is in, say, Mexico City.  Are you ready?  OK, then, now we are set to go. 

There are so many aspects of your national life that are controlled from south of the border, down Mexico way.  Traders face severe legal penalties if they use any other than the metric system; so forget about your quarter pounders.  Washington has no control over immigration policy or the nation’s territorial waters; foreigners and foreign fishermen can come and go as they please; that’s all to the good, because Guatemala and Honduras are about to join the Conglomerate, thousands and thousands already looking hungrily towards your vanishing border.  Your law making bodies are no longer sovereign; even judgements by the Supreme Court can be overruled.  By the lights of the American Court of Human Rights, based in Bogota, even foreign terrorists will be allowed to remain, living for years on public support, because they have a “right to a family life.”  If, for any reason, the government offers the people a choice on some aspect of the Conglomerate’s policy, then, if the result is a negative one, the people will be asked to vote again and again until the people get it right. 

You think this is a joke, that things could not possibly go to this extreme?  It might be a joke for you; I assure you it is not joke for us.  The EU, contrary to Biden’s BS, is not the beacon of democracy but its shadow.  The European Parliament is not Congress but a hugely corrupt sinecure.  European democracy is a pretence, a hollow shell, eaten from the inside by termites.  It’s not the people who decide on the great issues of the day but the bureaucrats.  Manuel Barroso, the bureaucrat-in-chief who heads the Commission, is a former Maoist, which may give some insight into the political techniques he favours. 

People of my generation have never had a say in whether we want to be part of the EU or not.  The last vote we had on the subject was in 1975, so only people of my parents’ generation have had a choice on something that is of fundamental importance to us all.  And that referendum, I should add, was based on dissimulation, evasion and outright political fraud.  Mother and father voted yes then; they will not vote yes now.

I have no interest in the American interest.  I have an interest in my own interest, an interest in my future and the future of my nation, which is precisely why I want out of this corrupt and deadening Leviathan, this contemptible Union.  For all these reasons and more I’m a secessionist.  Obama can go hang and, for good measure, let the EU drop with him.  Meanwhile I shall sit on my hands and whistle Dixie. 

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

The Man Who Was Thursday

I wrote this yesterday after reading a piece by David Cameron in the Sunday Telegraph.  It was specifically intended for the My Telegraph website, just me having a spot of fun.  I thought readers here might enjoy it also. 

David Cameron’s recent meanderings on the desirability or not of a referendum on continuing British membership of the European Union brought to mind some lines from A Man for all Seasons.  Sir Thomas More is in conversation with Will Roper, his future son-in-law;

Now listen well.  Two years ago you were a passionate churchman.  Now you’re a passionate Lutheran.  We must just pray that when your head’s finished turning your face is to the front again.

Two years?  My goodness; how slow Roper’s revolutions are compared with those of our dear Prime Minister.  His head can turn a full cycle in as many days!  Last week he announced that he was opposed to an EU referendum.  It was not the right thing to do, he said after the latest Brussels summit to patch and repair the euro.  Now it seems it is the right thing to do, at least it was on Sunday.  It would be hasty to make any predictions here, not when Cameron’s head is still spinning.

It seems that Thursday Cameron misrepresented the views of Sunday Cameron.  The man who was Thursday said no; the man who is Sunday said possibly…when the time is right.  I’m guessing that the time will never be right, that Sunday man is trying to hold off the Tory right.  One hundred of the party’s MPs wrote to the Prime Minister, calling him to legislate for a referendum on Britain’s relationship with the EU in the near future.

Quick; cue a new u-turn.  Sunday’s child is full of grace!  Britain, the PM wrote in the Sunday Telegraph, is in danger of getting swamped by EU legislation and bureaucracy.  In danger?!  One would almost think he knew nothing of this country, of our present political realities; that he had taken to wandering aimlessly across the world, hither and thither, like the ghastly Tony Blair.

I’m being ungracious.  For the moment Cameron’s head is in the right place.  For the moment he believes that the two words ‘Europe’ and ‘referendum’ can go together.  In that respect they are a bit like love and marriage – they go together like a horse and carriage.  Cameron’s spin comes, I suspect, because of the fox in the thicket.  Yes Fantastic Mister Fox in the shape of Dr Liam, the former Defence Secretary, who is preparing to tell Tory activists that life outside the EU holds no terror.

I applaud his good sense, though I think he is being far too coy.  It’s life inside the EU that’s full of terror, one unpleasant surprise hard upon another unwelcome development.  Inside our parliamentary democracy will get weaker and weaker, until the point where Westminster will have all the glory of a benighted county council.  Oops, I better watch my step in case some eurorat bureaucrat steps this way.  Life has become better, comrade.  Life has become merrier!

I’ll certainly be merry if a referendum is ever called.  I will vote with as much delight as I did in last year’s AV bash, a nail in the coffin of the Liberal Democrats, a party for whom I now entertain a special loathing.  But will it come?  I shall have to ask the man who was Thursday.

I was suddenly possessed with the idea that the blind, blank back of his head really was his face — an awful, eyeless face staring at me! And I fancied that the figure running in front of me was really a figure running backwards, and dancing as he ran.

The majority is always wrong

“Heavy fog in the Channel – Continent isolated”, so a headline in an unspecified newspaper at an unspecified time is alleged to have gone. True or not, it immediately came to mind when I read the reports that a mouse had roared; that David Cameron had said no to the latest scheme to shore up the crumbling euro. After surrendering so much over so many years we, as a nation, were finally fighting back.

Yes, he really did say no, exercising a British veto for the first time ever. We stand alone but we have, throughout our history, a proud tradition of standing alone against excitable French and German bullies. Personally I welcome the rediscovery of Splendid Isolation, a splendid policy for a splendid period in our national story.

This for me was a reverse Neville Chamberlain moment – there will be no appeasement, appeasement of the likes of France’s President Sarkozy, a man I find more laughable by the day, and Angela Merkel, Germany’s pig-like Chancellor.

Despite their differences the pair seem to blend into one another, the German woman and the French man, the pig and the frog - Merkozy, a monstrous synthesis that might very well have been tortured into existence on the Island of Doctor Moreau!

This is the Minotaur of the new European Union, a new Thousand Year Reich in the shaping, that looks set to end the forms of democracy and direct accountability that at least some on the Continent fought so hard to attain in the first place.

I’m going to come to this in a moment but first a few words on Cameron’s stand. It was all perfectly simple: he gave assurances to the government, his own party and the country beyond that he would not agree to a new European Union treaty that did not contain safeguards for Britain’s financial services industry.

This was hardly surprising, considering the amount of revenue the City of London generates for the Exchequer. But, no, Merkozy did not like this; the bumbling giant growled and slavered, whereupon David lifted his sling.

Now the other governments of the European Union, Britain apart, have to manage to form their ‘more perfect’ union in the best way that they can. All of them have agreed to a plan that that will allow for more centralised control of the tax and spending decisions of those countries that have the euro as their national currency, seventeen at the present. Why on earth those outside the euro have allowed themselves to be steamrollered into this is wholly beyond my comprehension.

Supposedly a way of introducing forms of fiscal discipline, the new arrangements effectively make a mockery of the last vestiges of national sovereignty. In future it really will not matter who the Greeks, the Poles or the Spanish vote for. The real decisions will be made in Brussels, not in Athens, or Warsaw or Madrid.

What irony there is in this; how strange it is to see history standing on its head. It makes a mockery of the Greek War of Independence, makes a mockery of that country’s struggle to re-establish itself after centuries of domination by the Ottoman Turks. And then there is Poland, a country served up as lunch time and again by the Germans and the Russians, a country that not so long ago freed itself from the one unrepresentative bloc only to cast itself into another, from Soviet Union to European Union. Democracy did not come easy to Spain, established by stages after the death of General Franco. It did not come easy but it’s going easy. At least Franco brought prosperity.

Setting the politics aside, the deal itself, another conjuring trick to reassure the financial markets, is little more than a promissory note – we will all be good girls and boys in the future. From the outset the euro was based on vanity, or the economics of the madhouse, I’m not sure which. It was based on the belief that it was possible to have monetary without fiscal union, that it was possible to bed down countries like Germany and Greece, the lion and the lamb, all for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Now we are to have fiscal union, a European Super State. The horse may have bolted but at least we have shut the barn door at last, is that not something? Meanwhile the debt gets bigger and bigger.

As for Cameron, well, bravo, that’s all I want to say, other than to remind him of some words from Enemy of the People, the play by Henrik Ibsen, that the strongest man in the world is the man who stands most alone, and that a minority may be right; a majority always wrong.

Ending Moral Nihilism

It’s not often I agree with the Bagehot column in the Economist but today I do, and for good reasons. The recent riots in London were a bit of a jolt, but something positive is emerging in the aftermath of anarchy: there has been a general shift in the popular mood towards the conservative right.

We had thirteen years of New Labour rule in this country, thirteen years of liberalism, political correctness and multi-culturalism. The end result has been not freedom but licence, not harmony but fragmentation. As Bagehot says, in the debate between freedom and order the latter is winning out on several fronts.

An orgy of burning, murder and looting has helped to confirm the Prime Minister’s repeated mantra that ours is a broken society. While the economy still operates a commanding position in most people’s minds, concerns over law and order are beginning to close up fast.

Our police force has been badly mismanaged, as I said in my previous article, with repeated waves of liberalisation reducing its effectiveness as an agent of order. There is nothing more dangerous to peace than a police service that is perceived to be weak; ordinary people loose faith and criminals become bolder. Civil liberty is all very well but not when it is accompanied by laxity and lawlessness.

If you think acts of disorder reflect badly on the ruling government I would urge you to consider a retake. Disorder in itself is not the issue; it’s the way in which the politicians act that’s important, the way in which they respond to the public mood. There is one paragraph where Bagehot really hits home;

…the backlash could extend beyond crime to include welfare and other social issues. The left is imploring the public to consider the underlying causes of the riots. They should be careful what they wish for. Voters might conclude that the deep-seated causes are not poverty, discrimination and austerity – the riots took place in a country whose government currently spends half of its national income – but welfare dependency, broken homes and moral nihilism.

We’ve been here before, of course, we’ve seen moral nihilism at its worst. One need not go as far back as the Gordon Riots of 1780, an episode I mentioned in The Shaming of England; there are the riots of 1981 in the same urban ghettos. Then the political mood of the country shifted decisively to the right, with Margaret Thatcher hugely increasing her Parliamentary majority in the subsequent general election. Consider also the urban and campus riots which blighted America in the late 1960s, which served as an overture for the age of Nixon.

David Cameron, the Prime Minister, has emerged from the burning a little like a phoenix, shining with a new lustre. His green and salad days are gone. At the height of the disorder he described parts of Britain as “not just broken but frankly sick”, going on to call for a “clearer code of values and standards that we expect people to live by”. Yes, indeed, values and standards that were lost in thirteen years of political drift at home, aggressive warfare abroad, all accompanied by the most abject forms of moral decay.

A Tale Told by an Idiot

David Cameron, our Prime Minister, wanders the world with a look of bewilderment on his face, understanding nothing, changing his message to suit his audience. A mendacious Tony Blair was bad but a stupid one is so much worse. Yes, that’s what we have in this fatuous ‘heir to Blair.’ There he is, ever so 'umble like Uriah Heep, apologising and wringing his hands over past ‘errors’; apologising for the British Empire.

It’s all part of the Blairite legacy, the politics of apology, the politics of hypocrisy. Blair took it to a fine degree; yes, he was sorry over distant things, things that happened long before he was born, like the Irish Potato Famine or slavery, while sanctimoniously and self-righteously justifying his role in the death of thousands in Iraq. Cameron is shaping up, attempting to walk in those shoes, offering an apology over the partition of Kashmir, an issue over which he has not the first clue, while bombarding Libya.

The trouble with Cameron, and please forgive the crudity of the expression – a reflection of my mood – is simply this: he does not know his arse from his elbow. He understands nothing of our history, more or less telling people, telling foreigners, what he thinks will please them most, even if it means talking this country down, even if it means forgetting the very real achievements of the past.

He read PPE – Philosophy, Politics and Economics – at Oxford, a course which, as Peter Oborne wrote recently, is notorious for skimming the surface of understanding and historical knowledge. But one would think he would be better advised. This is a man who believed that Britain was a ‘junior partner’ to America in 1940, or so he told Obama, when America wasn’t even in the war. This is a man who, as I wrote recently, considers Palmerston to be one of his influences (Cameron plays Palmerston, plays Blair) clearly with no understanding at all just exactly what Palmerston represented.

Last November he visited China wearing a red poppy. Now in Britain that is a mark of respect, a token of remembrance for the dead of two world wars and all conflicts since. But in China the poppy is a symbol of something quite different – it’s a symbol of humiliation, a symbol of the Opium Wars, when the country was obliged to accept importation of a drug that was ruining the lives of so many of its citizens. It’s not the poppy of Flanders the Chinese remember; it’s the poppy of Bengal, the poppy of Palmerston. Only the most ignorant individual, ignorant of history, could fail to appreciate that. Ignorant and appallingly ill-advised by the Foreign Office, Cameron had to be asked to take it off.

The past, as L P Hartley wrote in the opening of The Go-Between, is a foreign country; they do things differently there. But we should try to understand just exactly how they are done; we should try to have the message translated. Yes, bad things happened, yes, the legacy of Empire is not spotless, evidenced by the Opium Wars, but there was so much good also, so much that is being lost by Cameron’s muddled message.

In recent debate I argued in relation to the India that the British impact was generally positive. Amongst other things this huge country was united for the first time in its history; that it acquired a consciousness of nationhood for the first time. It was the British who ended abuses like suttee and thuggism; it was the British who created an integrated transport system. Above all it was the British who in English gave the people of India their first common language, something that has enabled the country to make an impact on the world economy in the present day. Cameron does no favours in holding out the anti-imperial crutch, the very thing that the likes of Robert Mugabe leant on most heavily as he ruined Zimbabwe.

We need a grown up leader for a grown up world, a leader who will stand up for Britain, a leader who understands our past, a leader who does not wander the world like an absurd penitent, sackcloth here, ashes there, gaffs everywhere. I tried to resist the impression for so long that Cameron was playing at politics, resist the impression that he is a weak, shallow and insincere man, a man not fit for high office. I can do so no longer. He is pathetic, a risible figure, an idiot telling a tale that signifies nothing, nothing beyond his own incapacity and lack of understanding.

Cameron plays Palmerston, plays Blair

Behold the Mother of Parliaments; behold the halls where Melbourne once faced Peel, where Gladstone once faced Disraeli. What do you see? It’s like some third-rate parody, starring two political pygmies - David ‘Tony’ Cameron and Ed ‘the Red’ Miliband. I’m a student of history, of political history in particular. It gives me no pleasure to say this but we seem to be in the final stage of senescence; the decline is over; the fall is to come. Yes, this is the way the nation ends, not with a bang but with a whimper.

There they were those two class acts, mouthing the usual mealy platitudes, a happy consensus over the intervention in Libya, over the neo-Palmerstonian approach of the Prime Minister. Yes, Palmerstonian. You see Henry Temple, Lord Palmerston, a dominant figure in British politics for a good bit of the nineteenth century, is apparently one of Cameron’s political heroes, something I found our quite recently.

What a tale there is to tell here! Palmerston, if you don’t know anything of his career, was the exponent of a particularly muscular form of imperialism, the kind that saw Johnny Foreigner as a shower of naughty school kids who needed a firm smack now and again, as well as the occasional pipe of opium to keep them placid, as the Chinese will know. Civis Romanus sum, was Palmerston’s motto, after his most famous speech, in which he argued that a British citizen should be able to walk the earth as the Romans of old, unmolested by any foreign power.

Cameron has gone that one step further: foreign citizens should be able to walk the earth unmolested by their own governments; sorry, make that unmolested by certain governments. Here we are, battering away at Libya in a mind-numbingly arrogant manner, in the pious hope that we will have peace, justice and the Western Way. But we won’t; we will have chaos; we will have death under a NATO umbrella – small wonder that Pontius Obama is washing his hands.

Here we are, a nation in the financial doldrums, a nation whose armed forces are not adequate for the task they have already let alone this new adventure, a nation now engaged in an open-ended commitment in North Africa with no appreciation of the possible outcomes. Palmerston at least had the means to enforce his will. Cameron, anxious to cut a figure on the international stage, has nothing beyond his own pathetic hubris…and a bomb or three.

I was asked in a discussion on the Libyan crisis, where I argued against intervention, if it would be OK to stay out and allow what will happen happen. Yes, I replied, with not the least hesitation; do we not have enough problems of our own without trying to attend to those of others? Does our attention make things better or worse? The world is full of bad people dong bad things. It is not our divinely-ordained task to set wrongs to right.

We are attacking Libya because we can, not because we must; we are attacking it in the same bullying fashion that Palmerston once dealt with places like Greece and China, though with considerable less self-interest involved; attacking it and ignoring the far greater danger from places like Iran and North Korea, attacking it in the name of bogus notions of justice and human rights; we are attacking it while justice and human rights are suppressed by our associates in Syria, Yemen and Bahrain. Stupidity makes me angry; hypocrisy angrier still.

There is also the naïve assumption that it’s the Colonel on one side and the rest of Libya on the other, that he has no genuine supporters, no people willing to fight and die on his behalf. They are dying alright, dying in an operation which was conceived - I am convinced it was - as no more than a grand assassination attempt – NATO as Murder Incorporated.

I’m a conservative and I’m a Conservative. I was delighted when Cameron became prime minister last May and I’ve done my best to remain loyal and supportive ever since. But this murderous Blairite idiocy is just a step too far. He is claiming to act in the national interest, claiming that if Gaddafi wins then instability would spread throughout the region. But the Colonel was on the threshold of ending a rebellion. Now it’s almost guaranteed to go on indefinitely, creating the very situation that this bullying aggression was intended to prevent.

I note from tonight's news that mission creep is already creeping; I also note that there is a growing awareness of the exact political complexion of the rebels, that it was not all mad rambling from the Mad Colonel.

The last thing Britain needs in the twenty-first century is a Palmerston by way of Blair; but that is exactly what we have. Cameron, Bruce Anderson wrote recently in the Telegraph, could have ended up looking foolish if his efforts at intervention had failed to persuade our allies. He prevailed; he is going to end up looking a lot more than foolish.

Cassandra’s Lament

If there is ever some future Chilcot Inquiry over David Cameron’s war on Libya he will, unlike Tony Blair, his avatar and inspiration, be able to wave his little flag: “But it was all perfectly legal. The United Nations said so.”

Oh, yes, there is that vote in the Security Council, with no opposition. But look at the abstentions, five of them, including Russia and China, countries that know how to play the diplomatic game according to the only rules that matter – those once laid down by Niccolò Machiavelli. Now, as western missiles and bombs once again rain down on an Arab country, the Russians are expressing regret over international military action, taken after a “hastily approved” UN resolution.

We used to play the game of diplomatic risk well in this country, in accordance with our own interests, but not any longer. Now muddle, incompetence and confusion is followed by a rush to the moral high ground. Cameron says that the present bombardment is “necessary, legal and right.” I wrote about this “necessary, legal and right” prospect not so long ago (Keep out of Libya), a whisper lost in the storm.

It’s just so frustrating, the stupidity and incompetence is frustrating, just as Cameron’s determination to walk in the paths of the wretched Tony Blair is frustrating. We, for reasons I find almost impossible to understand, given how overstretched our military and how threadbare our finances, are now involved in another dreadful gung-ho war, the hat-trick to add to Afghanistan and Iraq.

Consider what Cameron, Obama and Sarkozy have done, look at the possible outcomes. The Colonel’s offensive may be halted, frozen exactly where it is, leaving him in control of Tripoli and the west with the rebels holding on to Benghazi and the east. This may be a permanent state, with Libya hereafter a divided nation, a political fracture caused by tomahawks. I would hazard that the whole region will be destabilised as a result. I would hazard further that, once the dust settles, the Muslim world will see this exactly for what it is – another act of Western aggression.

But the Arab League is behind this, so the objection goes. Yes, they are, against repression in Libya while some of their hypocritical members enforce it in Bahrain. And what of Yemen, what of the people of Yemen, do they somehow matter less than the people of Libya?

But it’s the ignorance of our great world leaders that perplexes me most, their complete incomprehension when it comes to the Arab world, the tribal nature of the Arab world, the tribal nature of places like Libya. The Colonel for all his lunacy at least gave the place unity, a sense of national identity. David Cameron says he does not want a failed pariah state on Europe’s southern flank, “potentially threatening our security, pushing people across the Mediterranean and creating a more dangerous and uncertain world for Britain and for our allies, as well as for the people of Libya.” But, as Daniel McCarthy wrote recently in the Spectator, a failed state is exactly what Libya is almost certain to become, one of constant civil war between competing tribes, Somalia on the Med.

The rebels are not strong enough to remove Gaddafi by their own efforts, that much is clear, just as the Iraqi rebels were not strong enough to remove Saddam after the First Gulf War. So, what’s next? Mission creep, that’s what, either supplying the rebels with arms, causing yet more loss of life, or sending in ground forces to end the deadlock that this precipitate action is likely to create. Bombing alone is unlikely to remove Gaddafi. Just wait to see how Al-Jazeera reports, just wait to see how it goes down in the Muslim world when the first school or hospital is hit by a ‘smart’ bomb.

I can’t believe that I’m raising this; I can’t believe that our government has not considered this dreadful prospect, a government that launches aircraft carriers with no aircraft, an administration blinded by Cameron’s laughable self-righteousness. Was one Iraq not enough? Are we to see body bags from Libya? Starting one dreadful war without forward planning or proper comprehension may be regarded as a misfortune, starting two looks like carelessness, or stupidity, or a whole combination of things that have nothing to do with the interests of this country and its people. For the love of God, here we are again. Who would have believed it possible?

Oh, mystery, misery! Again comes on me
The terrible labour of true prophecy, dizzying prelude.
Do you see these who sit before the house,
Children, like the shapes of dreams?
Children who seem to have been killed by their kinsfolk,
Filling their hands with meat, flesh of themselves,
Guts and entrails, handfuls of lament -
Clear what they hold - the same their father tasted.