The Conservative leader might be a chameleon but the real problem is his party: it is a dead parrot. The House of Blair teeters set to collapse into a sea of scandal. It should only need a gentle kick from a Cameron combat trainer to topple this decaying edifice, yet new Labour still stands.
Tories are as unpopular today as before Cameron became leader, before cash for coronets or Charles Clarke’s get out of jail free cards to foreign murderers.
The worst part for Dave? There is little more he could have done. No husky, micro car or windmill has been left un-hugged: smile please, you are on Cameron camera! Bar coming out as transsexual, working class or German he could hardly have changed further. He is likable, presentable and busy. The media adores him: as the latest GQ mag cover boy he debates where he might put a tattoo.
So why hasn’t this bare-necked cheek worked? It is not that voters see through his gimmicks; rather, they have not seen them at all. Focus groups show voters did not notice Cameron was off with the huskies for that picture op (sorry, mission to end global warming). We have a filter for anything Tory: we might agree with a Tory policy, but if it is marked “Tory” we send it with the spam to “deleted items”.
There is anger at Labour’s failure to manage, be it prisoners, bedpans or Gordon Brown’s £2 billion tax credit overspend. Labour traduces the tabloids but is a tabloid government itself, chasing headlines, not running the country.
Our frustration is huge but no combat kick will work, as it still houses a Tory foot.
So what to do? Dave might accept that the Tory brand, like C&A and the Python parrot, has “ceased to be”. Cameron could found a new party with a new name and woo the Lib Dems. Labour sure is, when not worrying the typing pool or Angelina Jolie.
The Tory “democracy commission” is led, after a fashion, by Ken Clarke. I hear it has already ruled out changing the voting system. Why? If the Tories have any hope of power they must gain 10% more votes than Labour under our skewed system. That won’t happen. So they need the support of those who will never be blue. And to gain that they must support PR. How better to show you have changed than to say you will share power? Hey, then we might even believe Dave if he tells us the Tories aren’t dead, they have just been resting.
And so what? Squaddies kicked out of the army for drug possession might feel a little chippy that the defence secretary has illegal substances in his house and survives, but ministers have governed like they were spaced out for ages. It is only damaging in that it resembles the farcical days of Tory decay: Norman Lamont letting his flat to a Miss Whiplash after the pound was given a drubbing. It is the bad luck that afflicts all governing parties overdue a long rest in opposition; a party ceases to be taken seriously and ends up a joke. Just last week Neil Kinnock, a loud anti-speeding campaigner, was done for . . . speeding.
May Day is labour day but it will take more than a therapeutic sacking to cheer up Labour MPs. After Reid, the cabinet begins to resemble less a range of exhausted volcanoes than a row of burnt-out ashtrays.
Another Labour smokescreen
While wacky backy is found in John Reid’s house, another minister tries to ban smoking on stage. The ban will even apply to tobacco that is about as exotic as a wet week in Wigan.
You might think that, as a health minister, Caroline Flint has other priorities: like ascertaining how the zillions pumped into the NHS have gone up in smoke.
But no. Having told us to do an hour’s exercise a day (easy to fit in for Flint, perhaps; trickier for many) she now tells us what we can and cannot see on stage.
After criticism, she is floating a compromise. But it will be unworkable, like the hunting ban: allowing smoking if it is “integral” to the plot. So who decides? A languorous lovely with a cigarette holder might be integral to the mood of a Coward play, but the plot?
After Charlie Clarke insisted he was not the enemy of liberty, it seems odd Labour should revive the spirit of the lord chamberlain, the old censor. How long before a foot will be required to remain on the floor for a kiss? And will digs at ministers be banned?
Prezza and the FA – a perfect match?
The duffers running the Football Association make John Prescott look like a model manager. And as England have been spurned by a hairy Brazilian called “Big Phil”, why not solve two problems and hire Big John as caretaker? Two Shags should fit in well: it is a job requirement at the FA that you can run sweet FA.
His tactics might be basic, his style physical, his team talk less ball-in-net than foot-in-mouth; and his off-pitch activities are a risky example to those players fond of dogging. But could he be worse? This is a view little shared, but Prescott’s image has never been better: it is new Labour’s ultimate spin. First we are told he exercises on the office bike; then he leaves the gym and bonks his secretary.
Next we will be told he is top of his class at night school in English as a foreign language, that he has traded in his Jags for a G-Whiz electric car, and that he even hopes to beat Jade from Big Brother in next year’s marathon. Memo to FA: don’t miss a second winner.
It is customary to see Prince Harry cradling a pint glass. So to see him, as we did last week, with a pint-sized African orphan was good news. The Buck House spin doctors must have been delighted by the coverage.
But what happens to his “pal”, as the tabloids described Mutsu the orphan, once Harry is back in his familiar Boujis nightclub? Did the misery of Mutsu’s life mean more to the prince than just a photo-op? Some dislike the prince for getting drunk as a lord. Not me, I’m no puritan. Now he has set up an orphanage. If he is serious about it he deserves high praise.
But it entails toil — after the cameras go. The name of the prince’s charity, by the way, means Forget Me Not. The test is: will Harry remember, back in Boujis?
