It’s worth reading Danny Kruger’s oped in the FT today if you want to get grips with Cameroonism from the inside out:
All that Conservatives hold precious, the virtues of responsibility and independence, the habits of tradition and good order, the inclusive dignity of our institutions, are opposed; the benefit we derive from them is threatened by a league of philistines and profiteers, deluded do-gooders and residual socialists, not to mention the more overt social enemies who desecrate monuments and chant hate at the royal family. They need to be fought and defeated, intellectually, practically and politically.
These are good old fashioned English Tory values, not the neo Whiggism of the Thatcher years when the Conservative Party in part hawked many its old money values to the highest bidder in the market. It remains to be seen how long it takes Labour to come up with a credible counter phase.
My only quibble with Danny’s bríomhar account of Cameron’s prime virtues is one line in his final paragraph, where he notes the stupidty of the Lib Dems in promising not to bring in Tuition Fees (Clegg fought against his party on it, but lost): “Mr Cameron would never have got into the unreal policy commitment in the first place”.
More accurately Mr Cameron made his ‘unreal policy committments’ over Europe (leaving the EPP, and reneging on his promise of a referendum on Lisbon), which few of yer actual British electorate care about anywhere near as much as having to sub a child through their higher education.
What should concern those Tories who are still genuinely committed to the Coalition, is this unusually discomposed Cameron riposte to Nigel Dodds’ Fifa devious little ringer in which Mr Cameron seemed to imply that – on this subject – his partners the Lib Dems were an organised hypocrisy…
Undoubtedly, Cable was ‘stung’. But clearly too, he’d been drinking a little too much of his own cool aid for his or his party’s own good. The reality is that neither party in this coalition can really afford these gaps to open up further.
Danny’s piece sounds a little like he’s reading out his party’s pre nup statement… A reminder perhaps to the Lib Dems that this 5 year agreement may not be as binding as they thought after all…
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty