Rather an odd thing has been happening over the past fortnight. Again and again, the most improbable people keep talking admiringly about David Cameron, MP for Witney and Tory leadership candidate. What is odd about this is that the people in question, myself included, are not natural Conservative voters.
We grew up in the 1980s, loathed Mrs Thatcher and held her personally responsible for destroying the social fabric of Britain in a manner whose aftershocks are still being disastrously felt. I have never in my life voted Conservative — the very idea is like a sort of grotesque, unfunny joke. And yet the Cameron conversation just keeps on cropping up.
The basic gist of it is: isn’t it absolutely amazing that this man isn’t an alien. That he actually seems like a person you might have a conversation with. That he looks, you know, nice. That the things he says are humane and intelligent and make sense. Which leads neatly to: if he led the Tory party I might consider voting for them. Which naturally leads to: I can’t believe I said that out loud. Which leads to needing to have a little lie-down.
I’m not merely being facetious: in my lifetime there hasn’t been a single Conservative leader, actual or prospective, that hasn’t seemed like a creature from another planet (Ken Clarke is the exception, being like a jolly pass-the-portish friend of your dad’s) I mean, God bless them, but John Major? William Hague? Michael Howard? Or the shadow home secretary David Davis, who makes rather an enormous deal of having been raised on a council estate? Charming people, I’m sure, but the idea of them appealing to the left-leaning middle class was and remains sort of hilariously absurd. They weren’t just from another planet — they were from a spooky planet that seemed mean and cold and bigoted, and which nobody in their right mind would want anything to do with.
And then along comes Cameron. Of course his age — he’s 38 — works hugely in his favour, because he is the same age as those of us who may be re-examining our political allegiances as a result of having youngish children and thus new priorities, but who are still wary of old-school Tories, whom we privately suspect of snacking on babies.
Priorities such as education, for instance: much as it caused me piercing agony at the time, I realised a while ago that Conservative education policies make sense, whereas Labour’s simply don’t work unless you are especially keen on seven-year-olds who can’t read, or on teenagers who can just about master joined-up writing, or on A-level papers that read like those sub-O-level CSE exams that really thick people took in the 1970s and early 1980s (people like me — I might be the only person around to have failed CSE maths three times).
And like special schools, in which I have a particular interest: Labour’s policy has meant closing them down in the mistaken belief that a sprinkling of special needs children in every classroom would result in “inclusion”. Actually, what it results in is children with special educational needs feeling even more different than they do already.
Even Mary Warnock, whose bright idea so-called “inclusion” was in 1978, admitted three weeks ago — with the kind of monstrous complacency that makes one levitate with rage — that the policy had backfired and would leave “a disastrous legacy”.
Cameron is especially impressive on this, which may be because his three-year-old son Ivan has cerebral palsy and attends a state day centre for severely disabled children, but — whisper it — he’s pretty sound on more or less everything else, too.
Cameron’s coterie — sneeringly called “the Notting Hill set” by people who might do better to keep their chippiness under wraps — includes George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, who apparently has a Cameronian effect on the stubbornly unconverted, at least if the following e-mail, which I received last week, is anything to go by: “Dinner at X’s last night. Sat next to George Osborne. Gloom. Thought might invent babysitting crisis. Needn’t have worried — amazingly nice, funny, clever, entertaining. Normal. Who’d have thought? WHAT DOES IT MEAN?” Cameron, who is Michael Howard’s choice as heir, also enjoys the support of Boris Johnson, another commendable non-alien, though he is perhaps not entirely Of The People, either.
Being Of The People is the stumbling block. The Cameron conversation I keep having always ends the same way: they’ll never vote him in because he’s too posh — Eton and Oxford — so we can stop worrying ourselves over what it would mean for us to vote Conservative: it’s not going to happen.
Not being British, I can’t ever work out the arcane weirdnesses of the class thing; in this instance, I fail to see how someone being demonstrably intelligent and well-educated might conceivably pose a difficulty, just as I fail to see why David Davis’s being born on a council estate is automatically a badge of honour: it’s not like he had any say in the matter.
Did people whine about Churchill being a product of Harrow and Sandhurst, to say nothing of being born at Blenheim Palace? Is it really so awful that Tony Blair went to Fettes and Oxford? What would we prefer — a lone CSE in woodwork from the sinkiest of sink schools? Cameron’s wife Samantha, who has two children and a job, is routinely described as “the daughter of a baronet”. Well, yes. And? So: the Tories have got their chance to snare the likes of me and of a sizeable majority of my friends. If the party has any sense at all, it will elect Cameron to the leadership and, if the feeling in the air is anything to go by, very possibly pocket a great big slew of votes from people who have never voted Tory before, and never imagined they ever would — unless of course Cameron suddenly outs himself as a believer in the intrinsic evil of all immigrants, or as a weird homophobe.
If they’re stupid, which they might well be, the Tories will pass him by on grounds of chippiness, and we’ll continue to have no effective opposition, and we’ll all fall into a deep, coma-like sleep of boredom. Which will it be, I wonder?
- There was an incredibly tiresome hoo-ha last week over the “rights” of unmarried couples, including the “right” to “divorce” and “alimony”. If unmarried couples want the same rights as married ones, there is an extremely simple solution: they should get married. The benefits they feel deprived of are specifically designed for the married.
It’s so mind-bogglingly irritating, this debate: by all means cohabit, but then don’t whinge on like losers about how you’re not being treated in the same way as your married friends. You’re not being treated the same because you’re not married. Surely it’s not that tricky a concept to grasp?
