David Cameron is an unpredictable chap. Just when you think he’s shaping up to be a fine, transformative Prime Minister, he does something straight out of the Tony Blair Manual of Initiativitis.
Examples:
1. Asking prospective parliamentary candidate, Annunziata Rees-Mogg to change her name to Nancy Mogg to show she’s not a toff — even if she is. She refused, thankfully. Courting rebuffs with insulting requests is not good leadership. What on earth possessed him?
2. Having tarnished his famous cast-iron guarantee through a lack of candour about its sell-by date, it’s emerged that he turned down a most generous offer from UKIP which would have restored his honour on the Lisbon issue.
UKIP’s new leader, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, reveals he approached Lord Strathclyde, the Tory leader in the Lords, with an offer from Nigel Farage to disband UKIP if Cameron would hold a referendum on the issue come what may.
Of course, there would be no point in having a plebiscite on a ratified treaty, but using the moment to launch one on a Norway-Switzerland type arrangement for Britain would have yielded the result a large majority of the electorate wants.
Bringing it up fresh at a later date would only sever the connection between the promise and the policy, and hence put the EU collectariat on the front foot.
Recognizing that the new Prime Minister will have a Matterhorn of issues to deal with on day one, I have suggested The Syntagma Compromise (third outing):
Embed into the manifesto now an offer of a referendum three years into the next Parliament. It ticks all the boxes, gives the party a breathing space to prepare and allows it to sort out the financial and economic mess left by Labour.
3. I won’t even get started on the “green” aspects of modernizing Toryism. Christopher Booker has covered all the bases.
What David Cameron requires now is some real edge, not girlie initiatives. He also needs the appearance of a substantial backbone. Tony Blair is off the menu for the voters. Blairish attention-seeking and cheeky side-steps will only turn them away from the Conservatives at the next election.
Step up to the plate, David, or miss out on the feast that should be yours for the taking.
* * * * *
Last week in this column I wrote this: “Alistair Darling should do the decent thing and write an honest Budget Report based on Treasury and Bank of England advice. He should deny Gordon Brown any input … Darling would then be the only participant in this rear-end shambles of a government who could leave office with his head held high.”
In today’s Sunday Telegraph, Political Editor, Patrick Hennessy reports that Darling is going to do just that:
“[He] will use next week’s Pre-Budget Report to paint a grim picture of severe spending cutbacks during the next four years, setting up a pre-election clash with Gordon Brown.” Brown is opposing any talk of big cuts.
Now, I have no idea whether the Chancellor took his cue from Syntagma, although it is a possibility — I find quite a number of our ideas thread their way into the public domain days or weeks later. Take this case:
On November 14, I wrote the following column: Saturday Ramble: Poor information is destroying the quality of our lives:
“In the 21st century, the terrors haven’t gone away. They have re-emerged in the form of phantoms arising from surges of narrowly-based information, largely created by computer-generated mathematical models, … [such as] the fantasies of catastrophic man-made climate change. When even the Prince of Wales claims ‘we have 90 days to save the world’, you know that a new psychological contagion is upon us, and spreading fast.”
A week later, these fantasies are all over the press, thanks to bloggers like James Delingpole spilling the legumes on Climategate — the falsification of climate data.
See if you can spot the story in this column which will make news next week.
Vanity, all is vanity.
* * * * *
Annoyment of the week
A Gordon Brown freeish zone
Gavin Essler’s Newsnight interview with Mark Thompson, Director General of the BBC, was a red-mist moment for this diarist.
Referring to the Beeb’s “competition” (ha!), Thompson sneered at their “commercial self-interest”.
It’s the “self-interest” bit that pings me, commerce being generally held respectable. To attack everyone in the wealth-creating sector, which pays his fat package, as primarily self interested is not only wrong, it’s a hell of a cheek.
Let’s see, Thommo’s BBC “remuneration package” includes a salary of more than £800,000, plus various perks and generous expenses reimbursements, including a piffling parking ticket.
No self interest there, then?
PS: a few readers have said that their annoyment of the week is this annoyment snippet. Why? Because the word annoyment doesn’t exist!
It does now.
* * * * *
False data is again in the public eye with the sickening story of filthy wards and poor nursing at Basildon NHS Trust.
This is one of 11, and possibly many more, NHS hospitals that were recently inspected and pronounced “very good or excellent”. Clearly something catastrophic has gone wrong with the data-capture systems at these State institutions. It has also emerged that “cause of death” is rarely investigated, thus removing inconvenient information from the public domain.
This is a Labour party culture that has been obvious from Year One of its period in office. It has contaminated whole areas of public concern by skewing conclusions to the benefit of the government.
It is crude, nasty, and despicable. Alas this cult of truthlessness has infected most of the nation, like veins in a blue cheese.
* * * * *
A reprise on the BBC’s two current history series: Andrew Marr’s The Making of Modern Britain (Wednesdays, 9pm BBC2), and Diarmaid MacCulloch’s The History of Christianity (Thursdays, 9pm BBC4).
I gave them a bit of a hard time after their first episodes. Andrew was a mad Dervish, as I remember, while the Prof was fixated by his hat. Not what you might call deep journalistic critiques.
However, I’ve come to enjoy both programmes in the meantime, despite their quirks. I’m told that the Prof’s hat is not a white trilby, as I reported, but a Panama of an indeterminate straw colour. How wrong can you be?
AM meanwhile is still mucking about like a schoolboy — last week he plunged into a mud-dark sea in the kind of bathing costume last seen on Edward VII. Not a pretty sight.
The episode on the Great War was the turning point for me. Brilliantly put together, with extraordinary footage of the trenches, it caught the mood of the time perfectly. And the presenter kept his jokes to a minimum. Since then, it’s gone from strength to strength.
As for the Christianity series, it has become a majestic tramp through the long history of the “universal” church and its fragmentation into a myriad pieces — Protestantism alone is said to have more than 20,000 denominations. Unmissable compared to the rest of the Beeb’s output.
There, I hope that resets the balance after my scrappy start. I’m not right all the time, you know.
* * * * *
Like many law-abiding citizens, I carry a compact digital camera with me wherever I go. If something catches my eye, like the Monet pattern in the river you can see by scrolling down this page, I whip it out and train 8-megapixels on the subject matter.
Alas, I’ve known for some time that photography is another innocent pastime now demonized by the ‘elf ‘n’ safety tyrants. And not just them. Ever since the Madeleine McCann case the public has become jumpy if they spot a camera anywhere near their children. You can’t blame them, of course, but it’s yet another example of the innocuous becoming tarnished by a small number of evil men — and increasingly, women — in our age of intolerance and total exposure.
Predictably, a BBC cameraman was questioned last week under Section 44 of the Anti-terrorism Act for taking photographs of a sunset close to St Paul’s cathedral.
On this morning’s Marr programme he explained what happened. It seems two police officers were obliged to approach him over the “incident” and judge whether or not he was a terrorist casing the joint, if you can do that with a sunset.
Sounds like sunset for our culture and liberties to me.
John Evans
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There are two things every school child should be taught as the basis of their education:
What’s the best definition of a scientist? Someone who joins up two dots on a graph and, if they point up, shouts “fire”, if they go down, shrieks, “ice-age”.
