David Cameron

Boris Johnson, Follower-In-Chief

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

Boris Johnson - Follower in Chief - Brexit - EU Referendum - European Union

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Boris Johnson, Profile in Cowardice

While many of us rolled our eyes and lost what last remaining scraps of respect we may have had for Boris Johnson after his last-minute, nakedly self-serving decision to spurn David Cameron and back the Leave campaign, others seem to be swooning with delight.

The Telegraph conducted a delightfully unscientific poll of local Conservative Party Constituency Association heads, and found that a handful more local chairs now back Boris Johnson over George Osborne.

Boris Johnson has pulled ahead of George Osborne in the Conservative leadership race after coming out in favour of Britain leaving the European Union, a survey of grassroots Conservatives has found.

The Telegraph contacted the heads of 50 Conservative constituency associations and found that 12 back Mr Johnson, the Mayor of London, while eight support Mr Osborne, the Chancellor.

Theresa May, the Home Secretary, and Sajid Javid, the Business Secretary, have the support of just five of the Conservative Association heads between them after choosing to back the campaign to remain in the European Union.

Priti Patel, the employment minister, had the support of one association head while 24 said that they are undecided.

If leading the Conservative Party in your local geographic area still entitles you to call yourself a “grassroots” member, then one wonders what term should be used for the humble folk who stuff envelopes, knock on doors and distribute leaflets without the benefit of a title. Root vegetable conservatives? Tuber Tories? Surely something deeply subterranean, at any rate.

And leave aside for the moment the depressing fact that the only one of these potential future leaders who might reasonably be described as an ideologically uncompromised conservative – Priti Patel – has the support of only one constituency chairperson.

It is what comes next – the words of one Conservative constituency chairman, praising Boris – which is truly puzzling:

John Doddy, chairman of the Broxtowe Conservative Association, said: “Boris Johnson was needed to make a positive impact on Vote Leave. We needed a big hitter. The only potential leader that has shown considerable courage is Boris.”

The Telegraph picks up and runs with this Heroic Boris theme in the sub-headline to their article:

Exclusive: Grassroots Tories hail Boris Johnson’s ‘courageous’ decision to come out in favour of a Brexit in potentially ‘game-changing’ moment for party leadership race.

Considerable courage? Hardly.

Boris Johnson, Follower-In-Chief, dithered, vacillated and prevaricated for as long as he possibly could, until the Tory Leadership Acquisition calculus shifted around him (as other, more principled colleagues nailed their colours to the mast one by one) to such an extent that eventually there was only one option left open to the London mayor if he wanted to present himself as a viable alternative to George Osborne.

With all of his main rivals for the Conservative Party leadership swinging behind David Cameron’s fatuous and empty “renegotiation” and supporting the Remain campaign, the only possible way for Boris Johnson to find himself in the top two candidates selected by MPs for consideration by the wider party was for him to declare for the other side and then hope that his choice is validated with a “Leave” vote in the referendum, casting Boris as the only heavyweight to have been on the right side of the plebiscite.

But even then, one could tell that Boris Johnson was reluctant – that this Hail Mary political pass was the last thing that he actually wanted to do, and that it went against his own far more pro-EU instincts. That much was revealed by the fact that when outlining the reasons for his decision, Johnson initially floated the “can’t we all just get along” suggestion that we vote Leave only to wring a few more minor concessions from Brussels rather than actually leaving the EU, before eventually having to walk back this suggestion in the face of justified criticism and ridicule.

And yet there are some in the Conservative Party – generally those who would smile and forgive Boris if they came home from work to find him in bed with their spouse – whose determinedly superficial thinking leads them to hold Boris Johnson a courageous hero, and others in the media willing to help the narrative along despite its obvious falsehood.

“Considerable courage”? From Boris Johnson? If this is what bold and visionary courage looks like, I would hate to ever behold rank, abject, self-serving cowardice.

 

Boris Johnson - EU referendum

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David Cameron Is At His Arrogant Worst When He “Wins” PMQs

Samuel Hooper5 Comments

David Cameron - PMQs - Prime Ministers Questions

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Since he has proved himself incapable of cleansing the Tories of their unfair reputation as the “nasty party”, what exactly is the point of David Cameron?

The media is abuzz today with talk of David Cameron’s withering put-down of Jeremy Corbyn at Prime Minister’s Questions.

The Spectator breathlessly reports that “Cameron delivers a knockout blow to a struggling Corbyn“:

This could have been a tricky PMQs for David Cameron. Instead, it will be remembered for Cameron ventriloquising his mother and telling Corbyn ‘put on a proper suit, do up your tie and sing the national anthem’.

What gave this jibe its potency, is that it sums up what a lot of voters think of the Labour leader. It was not quite as Flashmanesque as it sounds. For it came in response to a Labour front bench heckle asking what Cameron’s mother would say about cuts in Oxfordshire.

Even before Cameron floored Corbyn with that line, the Labour leader was struggling. He chose to go on the NHS and the junior doctors’ strike. But even on this subject, he couldn’t make any headway. Worryingly for Labour. Corbyn’s PMQs performances are—if anything—getting worse. You can tell that Cameron is now just cruising through the Labour leader’s questions.

Responding to a heckle from the Labour benches about his mother, Mary Cameron (who signed a petition opposing local public service cuts), the prime minister let loose with all of the pent-up frustration he feels at Jeremy Corbyn’s refusal to play the traditional role of Generic PMQs Sparring Partner.

Here’s Cameron’s quote in full:

“I’ll ask my mother. Oh I think I know what my mother would say, I think she’d look across the dispatch box and she’d say put on a proper suit, do up your tie and sing the national anthem.”

If this is what “winning” Prime Minister’s Questions now looks like, then both the tone and content of our political debate – even by the low standards set by Parliament – is in far worse a state than even I have been lamenting.

And Tim Montgomerie’s decision to leave the Conservative Party is vindicated, as David Cameron’s latest flash of temper reminds us that under his leadership, the Tories are not interested in enacting radical conservative reform in the model of Thatcher, but rather seek to wield power just for the sake of it, while ridiculing everybody else from their lofty perch. Why else refuse the opportunity to respond directly to criticism and defend his record in favour of delivering smarmy, schoolboy jaunts directed at the Leader of the Opposition?

People who defend David Cameron’s rootless, opportunistic leadership of the Conservative Party love to claim that by steering such a centrist, New Labour-friendly course, the prime minister is in some way helping to “de-toxify” the Tory brand.

The clear implication of this is that we should shut up and accept the fact that there is almost nothing conservative about this Conservative government, because bland centrism and the failure to advance conservative principles is the price we have to pay whilst conservatism’s reputation is cleansed of the “stain” of Thatcherism. And to be fair, with so little else to recommend Cameron’s government other than the fact  it is not Ed Miliband’s government, they have a point. Detoxification is all that the Tories have going for them at the moment.

Except they don’t even have that. We live in a political climate where anti-Tory activists will daub “Tory Scum” on war memorials, spit at innocent people attending the Conservative Party conference and indulge in all manner of overblown rhetoric about the heartless Evil Tories coming to take away your human rights and cast your disabled relatives out onto the streets to die of exposure. If the past few years are supposed to have been an exercise in image rehabilitation for the Tories, they have been the most abject failure and waste of political capital.

Yet David Cameron is supposed to be our Great White Hope, the man who delivers Conservative majority governments at general elections by running away from any policy or principle which might be seen as “nasty” or right wing.

It is all the more surprising, then, that Cameron consistently chooses to be so nasty and unnecessarily aggressive at PMQs – not just putting his points across or counter-attacking forcefully, as PMQs requires, but actively relishing in delivering the most personal put-down or remark possible. Less Tony Blair’s devastating but above-the-belt “weak, weak, weak” jibe at John Major’s expense, and more “you’re too poor to buy nice clothes”.

Seriously, how did David Cameron think that his “proper suit” comment would play once it seeped beyond the Westminster and media echo chamber and into the public consciousness? Sure, it won a big laugh and sustained mockery of Corbyn in the House of Commons chamber, but replayed on television it just looks like a cheap and nasty stunt from a man who would rather resort to personal insults than answer a straightforward question.

People sitting at home – those few who actually pay any attention to the outcome of Prime Minister’s Questions, at any rate – will not have seen a clever and likeable prime minister slapping down an angry, extremist left-winger. They will have seen a haughty, self-important Old Etonian standing at the dispatch box and making cutting personal remarks about the sartorial choices of a slightly befuddled but harmless-looking professor type.

Even when David Cameron “wins” Prime Minister’s Questions (as he did today) he loses, because he is fundamentally incapable of winning his exchanges with the Leader of the Opposition without morphing into the most ridiculous caricature of a snobbish public school boy imaginable in order to do it.

And hey presto, Labour’s work is done for them – smoking gun evidence that the Tories are a party of arrogant toffs, and that if they had their way then politics would only be for impeccably dressed people from establishment families, wearing Savile Row suits and speaking the Queen’s English. And all Jeremy Corbyn had to do in order compound this perception in the public consciousness was wince through David Cameron’s latest smarmy insult.

Remind me: what was David Cameron’s essential winning quality, again?

 

Jeremy Corbyn - PMQs

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The Daily Toast: Douglas Murray On Putting Country Before Party

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

Tim Montgomerie - 2

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The exodus begins…

Douglas Murray lends an eloquent voice of support to Tim Montgomerie and his brave decision to quit the Conservative Party as an act of protest against Cameronism:

In the wasteland of principles that is Westminster, Tim Montgomerie has always been an exception.  The area is filled with ambitious, bland careerists whose idea of taking a stand (as with most of the commentariat) consists of trying to locate two ‘extremes’ before comfortably wedging themselves equidistant between them.  But in resigning from a lifetime’s membership of the Conservative party, Tim Montgomerie has demonstrated that there is still room for principles in politics.

[..] But here is the bigger problem for [Montgomerie’s critics]. It may well be that they shouldn’t care about the founder of Conservative Home, and one of their party’s most loyal and thoughtful members, choosing to leave the party.  Just as they may for the time-being not mind taking all those leaflet-deliverers for granted while riding against their core wishes.  But one day they may wake up to discover that amid all the high-handed dismissals and principle-free careerism, there is nobody around left to watch their political backs.  What a day that will be.  And perhaps it will come sooner rather than later.

If anything is going to hasten this day of reckoning, it will be the coming EU referendum. The party grassroots are overwhelmingly at odds with the leadership on the key question of Brexit. The parliamentary Conservative Party is on course to split just as dramatically as Labour split over the vote for military action in Iraq back in 2003.

Then throw in a rancorous, ill-tempered EU referendum campaign – our country is debating an existential issue, and tempers will inevitably fray and then snap. Things will be said that are far worse than David Cameron’s prissy, coded jibes at the expense of Boris Johnson in Parliament today.

And in the midst of this intra-party warfare, Conservative MPs may come to realise – or recall – that there is far more that divides them than just the question of Brexit. Other ideological differences, suppressed in the name of the “greater good” of general election victory, will come bubbling back to the surface.

Some Tory MPs might even make the mistake of asking themselves what the Cameron/Osborne legacy will be – and then recoil in horror when they realise that they fought their way back to power only to blindly implement Tony Blair’s fourth term New Labour agenda.

And then will come the desperate casting around for a more authentic conservative vision, and a more credible leader to bring it about. And vindication for Tim Montgomerie.

 

Read my take on Tim Montgomerie’s resignation from the Conservative Party here, as part of the “What Conservative Government?” series.

 

Tim Montgomerie

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The Media’s Unhealthy Boris Fixation

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Boris Johnson - Vote Leave

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We all know that Boris Johnson’s decision to “Vote Leave” is gratuitously unprincipled and self-serving. So let’s just stop talking about him – otherwise, we merely give his publicity machine the fuel it craves

Fraser Nelson gets to the heart of what really matters in the Brexit debate – how long it will take David Cameron to forgive Boris Johnson for his treachery:

Until now, David Cameron had been very lucky in his enemies: David Davis, Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband and then Jeremy Corbyn. But last night, the quality of his opposition in the EU referendum campaign rose rather substantially. He now finds himself arguing against not only against Michael Gove, the person he turns to when he’s short of killer lines, but against Boris Johnson, perhaps the single most popular figure in the Conservative Party.

[..] This is a gamble that could either leave Boris in the wilderness, or writing the next set of No 10 Christmas cards. Should David Cameron lose the referendum, he will probably have to resign as Prime Minister given how much of his personal authority is on the line. And who would succeed him? Not George Osborne, who urged the Prime Minister to hold an early vote. The leadership race will be decided by Conservative Party members, who are expected to back “out” by a margin of three-to-one.

[..] Already, there are signs of the Cameron operation closing ranks against Boris. No 10 has a semi-official vengeance policy: ministers with a long-standing opposition to the EU will be forgiven for backing “out”. The implication is that there will be no forgiveness for Boris, who has waited until now to declare his support for Brexit. “The last thing I wanted was to go against David Cameron,” said Boris yesterday. Quite true: what he wants is to come after him – and he is, as of last night, the bookmakers’ favourite to do just that.

This kind of breathless court gossip sometimes makes me despair of the Westminster media. There is a real, existential question before us right now – whether Britain should remain in the EU and follow its winding road toward political integration, or take a bold step toward independence and sovereignty. And a media class that did its job properly – speaking to the people rather than excitedly talking amongst themselves – would focus on the policy, not the personalities.

Does the Conservative Party leadership succession matter? Absolutely. Along with Tim Montgomerie, I have a significant ideological interest in who takes over from David Cameron and (hopefully) restores some radical conservative vision to the party of Margaret Thatcher. But there’s a time and a place.

Fraser Nelson at his best is a thoughtful and questioning conservative commentator – particularly when he focuses on social issues like welfare dependency. Were Nelson to fully engage his engine, we would likely all benefit from his considered addition to the EU referendum coverage. But as of Monday evening, everything Fraser Nelson has written thus far has focused on the tedious subject of Boris Johnson’s career.

I don’t need a poll to tell me that right now, people care more about the arguments for and against Brexit than they do the many fierce little psychodramas playing out between the Conservative Party leadership and Brexit-supporting Tory backbenchers, or between David Cameron and Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. But survey the mainstream media and you will find a lot more breathless leadership speculation than deep, forensic analysis of David Cameron’s fraudulent renegotiation, or the arguments for and against Brexit.

I’m sure that better stuff will follow. I hope it follows soon.

 

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Support David Cameron? I’d Rather Feel The Bern

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

Bernie Sanders For President

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Bernie Sanders or David Cameron? There’s no contest

At a time when far too many conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic have revealed themselves to be either snarling authoritarians (Marco Rubio, Donald Trump) or patrician, vacuous hairdos (David Cameron), the search for authentic commitment to individual liberty can sometimes lead to unexpected places.

Spiked are now making the controversial argument that this search leads all the way to Vermont, and to US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

Todd Gillespie writes:

Despite being slammed by some as a big-government lefty, Sanders’ track record is more complicated — and arguably more libertarian than has been appreciated. Even libertarian stalwart Ron Paul has come out in support of Sanders’ small-government credentials, shortly after his son, Rand, left the Republican race.

Bernie has espoused positions similar to Rand’s, even joining with him to oppose government surveillance. Last year, Sanders wrote a blistering criticism of the ‘Orwellian’ practice of spying on citizens. He voted against the 2001 Patriot Act and its dreadfully named replacement, the Freedom Act, in 2015 — both of which Clinton supported. He is arguably the only candidate left who takes positions that can legitimately be described as libertarian.

He supports freedom of speech. He backs net neutrality and opposes attempts to censor the internet. In 2005, he introduced the Stamp Out Censorship Act, which sought to prohibit the government enforcing ‘indecency fines’ on non-public media (it failed to pass). Recently, addressing students at Liberty University (a Christian institution whose president has just endorsed Donald Trump), most of whom think very differently to Sanders, he said ‘it is vitally important for those of us who hold different views’ to engage in debate.

Anti-surveillance. Anti-censorship. Pro civil liberties. Pro free speech. All more than can be said of many American conservatives, who ostentatiously flaunt their love of the Constitution – by which they mean the Second Amendment, while conveniently overlooking the First and Fourth Amendments.

Gillespie continues:

Sanders’ right-wing critics write him off as a big-state socialist. But a better label might be ‘libertarian socialist’. Yes, he has a vision of centralised government spending funded mainly by tax hikes on big business, but Comrade Bernie also envisages having a private sector with greater employee ownership. He has introduced legislation several times to increase government funding for centres that would provide training and technical support for the promotion of worker ownership and participation. He introduced the Rebuild America Act 2015, proposing an extra $1 trillion investment to renew America’s crumbling infrastructure, increasing airport capacity, improving and expanding railways, roads, bridges and broadband connection. He also wants to end crippling student debt and drastically increase loans to fuel small-business innovation. You can’t accuse him of thinking small.

Of course there is also much in Bernie Sanders’ platform to abhor – the punishing effective tax rates which would be required to fund this social democratic revolution, the increase in the size of government and the stripping away of agency and responsibility from free citizens to make their own decisions and take their own risks, for a start.

But perhaps it is also a sign of the divergence between the American and British political spectrums that I quite often find myself nodding along in agreement when the ornery senator from Vermont opens his mouth to speak. Perhaps when you move far right enough in your British politics (many certainly seem to think I am Thatcher on steroids) you actually break through and register on the far left of the US political scale.

And one thing is certain – if Bernie Sanders were prime minister of the United Kingdom, we would have a far more ideologically conservative leader than we currently have in David Cameron.

Spot The Socialist - David Cameron vs Bernie Sanders - Semi Partisan Politics - Sam Hooper

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