Looks like the Tories are getting a makeover. It’ll be interesting to see a transcript of David Cameron’s conference speech to see how many times he mentioned ‘Modern Conservatives’.

(Hopefully there’ll be a transcript as Dave delivered the speech without notes or autocue in an effort to prove he’s fresh and sincere. When I was in the school play I didn’t use notes or autocue either, if you know what I mean.)

Apparently the Tories are going to take us to a ‘new world’ as well. Cameron’s said so about a dozen times. No details of where and how the huge fleet of rocket ships required to get us there will be built.

Dave’s also a little behind the times by saying the Taliban must not get back into Afghanistan - the Taliban never really went away and looks as if they might be back in government sooner rather than later.

He also seems woefully ignorant of how things work in this country when getting the long term unemployed into work. He says he wants to bring in the private and voluntary sectors without realising the private sector are already involved and, in my experience, doing a pisspoor job of it.

I’d also like to know just what the ‘voluntary sector’ means. I suspect it means people prepared to do the job for nothing but I’m willing to be set right.

More, no doubt, later…

Update: The Facebook group ‘Am I the only person who doesn’t like David Cameron?‘ has doubled its membership since he mentioned it in his speech. Nice going.

And: Talk about hedging your bets: ‘Call that election. We will fight - Britain will win.’ Hardly an equivocal rallying call, that.

And more: Transcript now up on the Tories’ website. Counts so far: ‘modern conservative’: 6, ‘new world’: 11, (’new world of freedom’: 5).

Good to see David Cameron running with the Blair baton: every time it gets tough at home, he jumps on a plane and sods off abroad.

A triumph for yours truly this morning. My two small daughters were having lollipops. They enjoy their lollipops greatly and wanted more.

‘More?’ I said, ‘you’re clinging on to outdated mantras that bear no relation to the reality of life.’

They cried and cried. ‘More lollipops, daddy, we want more lollipops.’

‘It’s delusional to talk about these things in the future when we didn’t do them in the past,’ I said. ‘You’re splashing around in the shallow end of the lollipop debate.’

They blinked at me uncomprehendingly with their piggy little eyes and waved their piggy little fists. Game, set and match to me.

I don’t go round picking fights. I lead. I don’t follow my family. I lead them.

David Cameron has been found guilty of abusing parliamentary privileges by using his Commons office for party fundraising - in the first serious blot on the Tory leader’s copybook.

Why don’t the Tories rename themselves ‘Continuity New Labour’ and have done with it? I’m increasingly coming around to Mr Bridger’s world view: ‘Camp Freddie, everybody in the world is bent’.

(Link via Tim)

‘And I saw when the Lamb opened the first of the seven seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the Four Beasts saying, “come and see”.’

Revelation 6:1

It’s said the great civilizations of the past didn’t disappear overnight in sudden cataclysms. Instead, they slowly and sadly declined over long years. The Roman Empire, for instance, slipped away through an embrace of decadence and lead piping in its plumbing. A lethargic and slowly lead-poisoned empire was - eventually - too tonto to survive.

And so, like standing in the calm eye of a hurricane, when standing at the centre of a slow-motion apocalypse it can be difficult to tell that anything is wrong. But the signs that we’re doomed can be seen by those who choose to look.

The first seal heralding our own slow demise was opened this week when the media went into febrile paroxysms over the significance of David Cameron’s changing hairstyle. What was the meaning behind Cameron’s switch from a parting on the right to a parting on the left? Articles that didn’t quote ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ by The Who were as rare as non-piss poor journalism.

Confirming eschatologists’ fears, the total length of column inches devoted to Cameron’s new hair was *exactly* 666 miles. Miles and miles given over to whether the shift of parting was symbolic of Cameron’s political journey. Only mere inches, however, recorded that within days Cameron had changed again to a far more symbolically apposite spiv’s greasy quiff.

Let’s be emphatic about this. David Cameron wants to be the next Prime Minister - one of the world’s most powerful men - and current opinion polls show him having a good chance. Yet the media have so little to say about him that they went to town on his haircut.

He was also given a free ride over his House of Commons speech responding to the Budget. What it lacked in anything meaningful it made up for in endless flaccid jokes about Stalin and Michael Foot, a man anybody born after 1980 has never heard of. Listening was like trying to eat a spare rib with no meat on it but smeared thick with lemon curd. Or as Lib Dem leader Ming Campell cattily put it afterwards, ‘Once again, I am struggling to match the intellectual rigour of the previous speech’.

In the Book of Revelation, when the first seal is opened, a man appears on a white horse. There has been much speculation through the ages as to the man’s identity. Is it Jesus? Is it the Antichrist? More worryingly, we have no idea whatsoever how he wears his hair.

(First published in this week’s edition of The Friday Thing. Go and subscribe, it’s really good.)

Boy, am I looking forward to the next general election. Imagine it, the Clash of the Titans, Brown vs. Cameron!

It’s the political punch-up to end all punch-ups, the prize-fight for the championship, as these two heavyweights trade body-blows over the critical issues that will decide the destiny of the United Kingdom.

read the rest

Beau Bo D’Or says it.

Would Gordon Brown pass the ‘barbecue test’? Would we, ordinary British voters, invite him round for a burger and a beer?

(more…)

(First published in this week’s The Friday Thing.)

Erm, right. Welcome to ‘David “Dave” Cameron: Elegant Slumming’. Look out, Private Eye, we’re coming after you. Ha ha! Just let us finish putting our smalls through this mangle and eating our spam butty. Oh, look. A small child. Hang on, young person, just let us finish typing this. If only we’d known you were going to be reading this, dear reader, we’d have finished the chores and put the children to bed.

There. Hopefully you feel a little warmer towards us. Now you know that we’re regular guys who do regular kinds of things, just like you. Isn’t that great? We’re just like you!

(more…)

Did you know that a mere fifty grand buys you dinner with David Cameron? Maybe petit déjeuner with George Osborne? Hake with William Hague. Beef Wellington with, erm, whatever the rest of them are called. Having £50,000 makes you a clever person worth listening to.

Well, I thought, why the hell not?

I will pay £20 towards a £50,000 membership of David Cameron’s ‘Leader’s Club’ but only if 2,500 other people will too.

It looks like we’re going to be funding the Tory Party (as well as the others) soon anyway. So I figured we might as well get a bit of practice in early and maybe even get something out of it.

The Blair-Cameron continuum does not surprise me. Populism in Britain is systemic, involving a tacit complicity between left and right. By this I mean that the consequences of egalitarianism and the free market could, in practice, be remarkably similar, and that the main victims in both cases are likely to be at the lower end of society. For all their protestations to the contrary, neither right nor left really believe in meritocracy. At heart the left retains a gut opposition to selection in any form, while the right is in favour of competition everywhere except where it impinges on the educational and social privileges of the right itself, its sons and its daughters. But a situation in which talent finds no way forward while an elite of populist mediocrities holds power in field after field will, in the long term, prove damaging to the country.

read the rest…

The - clearly shitting bricks - Labour Party floated another ‘Get Cameron’ strategy this week. After the craptacular ‘Dave the Chameleon’ campaign died on its arse - it turned out that the public, and Cameron himself, quite like the computer-generated lizard who wears hats, rides a bike and changes colour - Labour’s finest minds decided enough was enough: Time for gloves off and knuckle-dusters on.

What’s the new idea that will demonstrate only a mother could love the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition? Depicting the Tory leader, according to the Sunday Times, as a ‘floppy-haired estate agent’, that’s what.

(more…)

So, Squit the Younger gets the nod for top Tory factotum.

Following the Conservatives’ example, I’ve now given responsibility for our household to my five year-old daughter. Sure, I have more knowledge and experience but she’s a hell of a lot cuter. When I report back in a few months that we’ve all got scurvy due to our diet consisting of nothing but Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food ice cream and McCain Smiley Faces, at least I’ll be secure in the knowledge that the important decisions were made by the best looking member of the family.

Cameron wants to end “Punch and Judy politics” (anybody else utterly sick to the back teeth of that phrase?). He also, clearly believing that the last drop of meaning has yet to be bled from it, bandied about the word “consensus”. Political geeks are wetting themselves at the prospect of Prime Minister’s Questions today when it’s actually going to be like the episode of Futurama, A Head In The Polls:

LEELA: Don’t let their identical DNA fool you. They differ on some key issues.

JOHN JACKSON: And I say your three cent titanium tax doesn’t go too far enough.

Yay for politics.

Still, there’s always hope that PMQs will be a dispiriting, unsettling experience for both Blair and Cameron.

See Blair, yesterday’s man, hair thinning, eyebags swinging, mortality looming, his dead man’s stare burning across the despatch box at the Young Turk, a vision of what he once was.

See Cameron, Man of Tomorrow, his rictus grin wavering as he regards the sight of virility spent, of promise unfulfilled, opposite him - the vision of what he is to become, like a portrait in the attic.