David Cameron’s favourite album, allegedly, is The Queen is Dead by The Smiths. I’ve always wondered how that will go down with Her Majesty when he pops in for one of his weekly meetings…oops, I mean ‘if’…because now his chances of leading the country depend on Nick Clegg.
The Cameron/Clegg relationship reminds me of another Smiths’ song: ‘Oh, would you like to marry me/and if you like you can buy the ring’/She doesn’t care about anything…’. Poor Dave is the ‘she’ in the song – he needs to seem very, very nonchalant. He needs to look as though he doesn’t really need Clegg. If he looks desperate, Clegg will ask for too high a price – Proportional Representation, which would change the Conservative party forever. And desperation will get him into trouble elsewhere, too.
The real enemies are behind him – sharpening knives. ‘Unnamed Tory sources’ have been letting displeasure slip since the early hours of Friday morning. They see him as a failure because, even though he engineered the biggest swing since 1931, he didn’t manage to completely rewrite the history books and win a majority. These short-sighted critics don’t see where the real problem lay.
This year’s election was never going to be the one. With the first-past-the-post system, the Opposition has to over-turn majorities slowly, one brick at a time. That’s why Labour didn’t win in 1992. The blame for the Tory failure lies with William Hague and Michael Howard, who hadn’t achieved enough in 2001 and 2005. It was always an impossible task for Cameron this time.
The Conservative Party thought that Cameron was their Blair. They woke up on Friday to find out that he was their Kinnock.
Another way of looking at it is that he IS indeed their Blair, but the party faithful are too conservative. They can't re-brand themselves as New Labour did, so DeCameron is prancing out, a hopeful new pony, but leading a Jabberwocky.
ReplyDeleteInteresting times indeed.