Downing Street Smear Operations

[Hansmeister]

I really, really don't trust Cameron.
He's the toriest tory we've seen for some time yet the way he pretends not to be....

He strikes me more as a Blair-clone.  The Tories figured they needed somebody just like Tony Blair to become credible again and it worked.

Problem is that the situation in the UK is now very grave and the country needs a leader of more substance than style, something Cameron can't provide.

[alfred russel]

Good for the Tories.  Still, it doesn't matter, since there's no reason for Brown to call an election until the last minute.  Not that Brown really matters in Labour anymore.  He's just leading them to electoral Armageddon, at which point he can be scapegoated and replaced.

I think he should be scapegoated and replaced now.  By James Purnell who can then appoint a cabinet of Young Turks and demolish the Tories

I thought you were a Tory?

[Neil]

Good for the Tories.  Still, it doesn't matter, since there's no reason for Brown to call an election until the last minute.  Not that Brown really matters in Labour anymore.  He's just leading them to electoral Armageddon, at which point he can be scapegoated and replaced.

I think he should be scapegoated and replaced now.  By James Purnell who can then appoint a cabinet of Young Turks and demolish the Tories

I thought you were a Tory?

Sheilbh is from Liverpool.  They hate Tories there.

[Sheilbh]

He strikes me more as a Blair-clone.  The Tories figured they needed somebody just like Tony Blair to become credible again and it worked.

Problem is that the situation in the UK is now very grave and the country needs a leader of more substance than style, something Cameron can't provide.

I agree and disagree.  I think he was always less interested in fighting Blair than he was in fighting Brown.  Simply because he knew Blair was leading and choosing between a fight with one of the best politicians in the post-war era and the great clunking fist, you'd always choose the latter.

The Tories were poisonous.  There's that famous poll were a pollster would read a policy and ask whether it was a good idea.  Then he'd tell people it was a Tory party idea and, on average, the number of people who thought it was a good idea dropped by 20% when they found out it was Tory.

They sort of realised this.  So, every time they got a new leader there would be a move towards modernisation.  It never yielded immediate effect and the leadership generally returned to pleasing the base.  Now I'd argue that some of that early modernisation really helped the Tory revival.  Iain Duncan Smith is probably the most right-wing Tory leader in years.  Yet he really is passionately committed and interested in social justice, he really does feel that the poorest in our society have been failed.  Now his talking about that as a Tory leader didn't really work, but Cameron's used some of his ideas.  So now Cameron gets photoed on dodgy housing estates talking about 'Broken Britain'.

Now it's worth saying that Cameron won the leadership on the basis of one speech at Party Conference.  He performed very well (without notes, roaming round the stage) and his basic message was that the party needed more than itself to win.  Since then he's overwhelmingly running on a typical Tory platform.  They're happy with gays, which was long overdue because everyone else in British society was.  But on actual policies they are boilerplate Tory stuff.  The message, the photoshoots and all that are different but the policies are the same.  This was wise.  The Tories don't like immigration or Europe.  That's fine.  Everyone knows that.  When all they talk about is immigration or Europe they sound nasty, unreconstructed and slightly xenophobic.  So Cameron's policy on Europe is the most right-wing any Tory leader has ever proposed, while his policy on immigration is a crib of Michael Howard's.  But it doesn't worry people because it seems like he and the party have developed interests into other aspects of government.

He's not like Blair because although Blair came into office with the impression that he was 'bambi Blair', he  was ruthless.  He had radically reformed his party, the blood was still on the conference hall carpet.  He came in with a reforming zeal that Brown tempered somewhat, especially in the first term.  Blair, in the days when he was describing New Labour as 'the political wing of the British people as a whole', he had made it his mission to modernise Britain.  Modernisation is a word that sort of rings through Blair's speeches and I think his ideas.  He was a genuine radical, not the facile shallow creature people believed him to be.  Cameron isn't.  He has created the image but without the actual changes to the Tory party that would make them worth voting for, or, indeed, human.

Generally I agree that Cameron's too lightweight, too callow, absolutely lacks heft.  I don't think the Blair comparison sits at all because Blair always had that missionary zeal, that reforming ideology.  Cameron's more like MacMillan without the charm.  In terms of actually changing things I can think of two areas of policy which Cameron has differed from his predecessors on: welfare reform and education. 

On welfare reform it looked like it would be a big winner.  The ideas were actually the ones Blair had wanted in his first term before the dour man next door took objection to them.  Unfortunately for the Tories James Purnell stole the policy and got it past Parliament.  Since then the Tories have nothing on welfare except sour grapes.

Education again, is interesting, Michael Gove has pulled together a really radical schools reform based on the Swedish model.  That involves vouchers, public-private, parents being allowed to set up independent schools and so on.  It's very interesting and it worked in Sweden.  Now I actually think Labour should steal that too and pass it.  We should be continuing the modernising trend of Blair and that means dominating the centre ground.  Leave Cameron with nothing but pictures of huskies and the same old right wing stuff that lost Hague, Duncan Smith and Howard their elections. 



Plus and this is an entirely unrelated point, until the smear story hit, I thought the Tories would lose.  I know they're ahead in the polls but I think they're very close to looking like the enjoy the recession too much.  I think that Cameron, Osborne and Dan Hannan (internet sleb that he is) seem very Oxford Union debating style and when they have a baying pack of Tory MPs at their back it doesn't sit well.  I think Cameron was set for a Neil Kinnock moment (the pre-election rally in Sheffield - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G8F-4du3rQ ).  And Dan Hannan's a gift for Labour with his popularity in the US leading to him speaking on Fox News and saying 60 years of the NHS has been a disaster for this country

I thought you were a Tory?

No.  I could never vote Tory.