David Cameron still fails to summon up the blood in his efforts to become Prime Minister. In his Marr interview this morning, the anticipatory excitement normally generated by a new beginning hardly registered on the political voltmeter.

Cameron is personable, plausible without being eloquent, but oddly lacking in the rousing qualities that drive great, transformative leaders. Those qualities can only come off the back of at least one stirring policy agenda.

In five months, he will have the opportunity to destroy two fractious national boils once and for all:

1. The matter of the NHS, long seen as a Labour fiefdom, but now a source of massive delinquency in the public finances.

2. The matter of Europe — an aching void largely of the party’s own making, thanks to Edward Heath and John Major, but now hitting a tipping point through the less-than legitimate Lisbon Treaty. Within the next Parliament a crescendo of Conservative opposition will hamstring the Government if it doesn’t act swiftly to head it off.

Yet, on these two issues Cameron repeatedly claims the policy is settled. I believe he is planting the seeds of his own downfall and the failure of the future Tory Government.

Without restraining and overhauling the NHS, the public finances have little chance of a swift reduction. Lacking a determined effort to reverse most of the Lisbon Treaty, the disaffection in his party will cripple him once the honeymoon period is over and the power transfers become much more tangible.

In the medium-to-long term, no other policy areas matter as much to the health of the new Government. During the coming crises, he will need to rally the troops and the nation behind his intentions. Simple managerialism, however competently portrayed, won’t do the trick.

The NHS, and the wider public service, needs to be tackled with vigour, which does not necessarily preclude improved services for most people, as I’ve been writing here for some weeks. Europe offers an easy hit to maintain popularity levels in the country, as well as in the party itself. Dodging both is not a realistic option, as David Cameron will soon discover as the Parliament progresses.

Currently, his big idea seems to be not to have one.

No sooner does Syntagma suggest a coup may be in order against the loathesome creature in Number 10, than one pops up a week later.

Admittedly we put forward Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, as our Young Lochinvar, but Geoff Hewitt and Patricia Hoon were what we got — (sic, in case you wondered). Ah well, best laid plans and all that.

But hold on, although this coup lite was easily put down by the tyrant of Downing Street, a couple of journos have suggested that this may have been the intention. Both Peter Oborne and Matthew Parris believe our two would-be LameDuckicides simply wanted to damage Gordon Brown.

If I understand the argument aright, Peter Mandelson — whose hand must have been in there somewhere — actually wants “old Labour” to lose badly at the General Election and for the Brownites to be expelled from the party with the fizzing contempt they deserve — the words Japanese knotweed spring to mind. Re-enter “New Labour”, the party of Ivanhoe, and the old battle for the centre ground can resume, perhaps under his nibs’s leadership.

I can’t help thinking that’s a bit fanciful, since NuLab has been totally trashed by the reputational collapse of Tony Blair. But, hey, Mandy creates his own reality, doesn’t he?

If he does, like a bad spell it all went wrong when he was sacked twice from the Cabinet. Let’s not assume these people have more magic than the rest of us. If Brown and Blair are anything to go by, they had set up their own downfalls at the outset.

Problem is, they took us with them.

Annoyment of the Week
A Gordon Brown Free Zone

In PMQs this week David Cameron allowed Gordon Brown off the hook on the public finances. He accused Brown of presiding over the worst budget deficit in our peacetime history — £200bn give or take ten billion here or there.

Brown countered, as usual, that the UK national debt, as a proportion of GDP, was less than in many comparable countries. The fact that the obscene deficit means that the national debt is rising much faster than our rivals’ got lost in the argument.

Debt is a dynamic quantity, Cameron might have said, and never more so than when in the hands of a hopelessly big spender, like Brown.

David Cameron never seems to nail the old fraud on this one.

I think we can all agree that last week’s Conservative Party poster campaign was hardly in the Thatcher/Saatchi league.

For a start, the message was weak and left the impression that the NHS would get more money however hopeless it is, while other services shrivel along with the health of the public finances.

I spent a little time thinking of a much better one, with a simple message of true genius:

“We can’t solve our problems with the mind that created them.”
Albert Einstein

(Bad picture of Gordon Brown)

You don’t have to be a genius to get rid of Gordon Brown.
Conservatives

Syntagma offers this to Tory high command absolutely free of charge. And, no, unlike some, I don’t want a safe seat.

We are entering a 20 to 30-year mini-ice age, according to dependable scientists.

Professor Anastasios Tsonis, head of the University of Wisconsin Atmospheric Sciences Group, says, “[The present freezing weather] isn’t just a blip. We can expect colder winters for quite a while”

He added, “I do not believe in catastrophe theories. Man-made warming is balanced by the natural cycles, and I do not trust the computer models which state that if CO2 reaches a particular level then temperatures and sea levels will rise by a given amount. These models cannot be trusted to predict the weather for a week, yet they are running them to give readings for 100 years.”

Tsonis said that when he published his work in the highly respected journal Geophysical Research Letters, he was deluged with “hate emails”. “People were accusing me of wanting to destroy the climate, yet all I’m interested in is the truth.”

Mind you, given the current state of our rapidly cooling climate, many will be inclined to say, bring back global warming, all is forgiven.

Swans on the frozen River Exe yesterday:

John Evans

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This week’s list of betrayals in the profoundly dispiriting battle to force the nations of Europe into one solid mass, makes depressing reading for anyone with a knowledge of history.

Frank McLynn’s terrific book, 1759, reminds us that it was “the year Britain became master of the world.” The Seven Years War was raging around the globe, and France was a ferocious threat to England’s very existence. It was a world war in everything but label.

In those days the British had some steel. They fought back and won decisively in India, Germany, Canada and the West Indies, gaining total mastery of the seas in the process and effective global supremacy.

It was the age of the greats: Edmund Burke, Dr Samuel Johnson, Pitt “the Elder”, Earl of Chatham, and John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, Winston’s extraordinary ancestor.

Compare and contrast: it’s 2009, exactly 250 years later: Gordon Brown and David Miliband are in charge of the country. Tony Blair is eagerly waiting in the wings for a call to be the unwanted President of Europe. Together with Peter Mandelson they have secretly conspired to make Britain unrecognizable on many fronts.

When first in office at the backend of the 1990s, they opened the floodgates of third-world immigration in an attempt to paint the Tories as racist and “change the face of Britain forever”.

The UNHCR at that time said that Britain would soon be “coffee-coloured”. How did they know that? Every request they made was rapidly turned into British policy by Barbara Roche, the minister then in charge. Now we know it was at the behest of the party leadership, a deliberate, underhand policy by New Labour to change the population of England to increase the type of person who would vote for them.

Was the country ever consulted about this hyper-radical policy? It was not.

At his recent party conference Gordon Brown thundered: “Harriet Harman’s Equalities Bill will change Britain forever”. There are those words again. How often they crop up.

But there’s more. Blair, Brown, Miliband and Mandelson have plotted and schemed for years to sink the country into a European constitution against the will of its people, and without any reference to them, despite cast-iron promises to the contrary. It will “change Britain forever”, they believe. Like a sugar cube dissolved in hot coffee, there’s no possibility of ever reconstituting it. The power of self-determination, hard-won by great leaders of the past, is being lightly tossed away by nonentities.

Their policy of cultural, physical and political destruction is without precedent in peacetime. It’s a magnification of what the Nazis would have attempted had they conquered the country in the 1940s, but made worse by its Shakespearean betrayal of trust.

A group of Marxist — sorry, “progressive” — revolutionaries have been “changing Britain forever”, under the radar, for the past 12 years. Some of us knew that and protested in vain. The rest just sleepwalked into the nightmare.

Compared with the leaders of 1759, the present crew are the lowest species of bacterium. Nasty, brutish, and without a shred of decency or shame. When their story is written, they will go down as the worst traitors in British history — once the electorate has savaged them out of office.

Some Prime Ministers grow in stature over time. Margaret Thatcher is the most recent example. Others are diminished by high office: Edward Heath and John Major, to some extent, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown beyond any redemption.

David Cameron is still a blank page to many voters. He has undoubted leadership qualities and good intentions. But his task will be daunting — although it’s the enormity of the challenge that makes the long remembered leader.

In office he will need to sling the hook of the current crooked bunch and resurrect the spirit of 1759.

It won’t be easy. But it never was.

John Evans

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There are four great offices of state in our political system. In the past each has been filled by some of the most impressive and eminent people this country has ever produced.

This week, the Labour party’s choice of incumbent for each of these posts has been revealed as beneath contempt.

We have a Prime Minister whose dark, raging, uncontrolled mentality has been filleted in public and found to be empty of content.

A corrupt Home Secretary whose natural job would be as “dinner lady” in a bog-standard comprehensive.

A lightweight Foreign Secretary who is remembered only for waving a banana around like a hyperactive gibbon.

A Chancellor of the Exchequer who is so out of his depth he is widely seen as the stooge of the Prime Minister.

When the revolution comes, we were told, the masses will rise up and occupy positions of great power in the land. Well, it’s here. The lumpen proles have taken over. As far as we know they didn’t have to shoot anyone, although they have hounded one or two to their deaths, and sent more than 300 soldiers to theirs.

Are we pleased with ourselves?

A nation gets the government it deserves. Britain has only itself to blame as it suddenly discovers that British left-wing politics has not got talent.

In a few days, the Chancellor will unveil his Budget. His assets are, an empty kitty, ballooning debt, falling tax revenues, a financial and currency collapse, and an economy heading for ruin and mass unemployment.

He’s already resorted to printing money and has failed to find buyers for all his debt. Or rather “our” debt.

The nation’s fate lies in his hands and those of the man who created most of the mess in the first place, Gordon Brown.

Do we deserve such a fate? Many of us don’t. They are: those who would rather drown in a fetid bog than vote Labour, and those of us who have been warning of this disaster for years.

But all those middle class folk who fell for “nice” Tony Blair and sturdy “son of the manse” Brown, and kept them in office for three Parliaments, have much to answer for. The wreckage of the country lies at their greedy, unthinking doors.

Natural cycles ensure that the wheel turns at last and allows others to take their place. The longer-term problem is that it will also turn again, and the same mob — with different faces — will gain power for a repeat performance.

If there is a lesson from all this it’s that the Labour party should be destroyed electorally so comprehensively at the forthcoming election, it will never recover again.

It must go the way of the old Liberal party, a rump now, dreaming of the past and not the future.

People forget. Youngsters come along with their own agendas and are easily gulled by slick con artists, and mental defectives who believe their own propaganda.

We have one consolation. It won’t be for another generation at least.

Let’s enjoy the next couple of decades unreservedly, and pray the Tories don’t mess it up and let the mob back in again.

John Evans

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On this morning’s Today Programme there was a good-natured discussion about Confucius. The Master would have been pleased.

It seems the old Sage is enjoying a comeback in his native China, where the Communist ruling elite is considering changing its name to the Confucian Party. Have they actually read his words, I’m tempted to ask?

Here’s a little flavour in the form of a quiz:

1. Which British Prime Minister does this saying suggest?

The Master said, “It is rare, indeed, for a man with cunning words and an ingratiating face to be benevolent.”

Clue: Initials, TB.

2. To which British Prime Minister could this saying be directed?

The Master said, “In guiding a State of a thousand chariots, … be trustworthy in what you say; avoid excesses in expenditure and love your fellow men; employ the labour of the common people only in the right seasons.”

Clue: Initials, GB.

And a lesson for the Labour party when in office:

The Master said, “If you insist on guiding them by edicts, keeping them in line with punishments, the common people will stay out of trouble but will have no sense of shame. On the other hand, if you guide them by virtue, keeping them in line with long-held conventions, they will, besides having a sense of shame, reform themselves.”

Now that’s a good principle for a new Conservative Government — remember the Common Law?

Finally, another ancient Chinese saying that Brussels would be wise to heed:

Create ten thousand regulations and you lose all respect for the law.

Where is the modern Confucius? We could do with him now.

John Evans

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As a person without any debts, and four bank accounts coloured black, I awoke yesterday morning to find the country’s National Debt at £2 trillion ($3tr) and more. That represents more than £60,000 ($86,000) and rising per household. It dwarfs Britain’s annual national income of £1.4 trillion, and doesn’t include other off-balance-sheet liabilities.

Since I am a genuine citizen of the United Kingdom, I am liable for that sum, and probably more from people who can’t or won’t pay, and from more recent arrivistes who decide to desert the heavily listing vessel.

I won’t get an invoice in the post: “For gross mismangement of the economy by Gordon Brown”. That would be too candid and straightforward.

Instead, I’ll find almost every public and private bill will rise, while any receipts will fall and services diminish. Prices in the shops will also start to balloon in a year or two and will remain high for decades to come.

Thus, this debt-free individual, who earns his own living, with savings in the bank and other less liquid assets, will suffer the consequences of others’ malpractice through substantial impoverishment.

Almost everyone in the country will be on a similar path, except those with institutional parachutes to comfort, like politicians, top bankers, and the upper reaches of the Civil Service who caused the problem at source. In modern Britain the buck only stops when it nestles in the pockets of the guilty.

The principal culprit, as almost everyone now realizes despite his increasingly-pathetic attempts at shovelling it off onto others, is Gordon Brown, the man who ran the Treasury with an iron fist from 1997 to 2008 and has been British Prime Minister since then.

In France, within almost living memory, he would have faced the guillotine. In Britain, more likely disgraced and forced into a humbling exile. Even now, he can be impeached by a much-abused nation. Why is this not being discussed?

The other big number this week is 219. Not so significant, you might imagine until you add “billion” on the end. £219 billion ($311bn) is Brown’s yearly overspending in real terms, i.e. above inflation. (From Bankrupt Britain by City fund manager, Malcolm Offord.)

It’s not good economics, but multiply that figure by 10 and you get a rough approximation of the new National Debt.

The pity of it is, the money was wasted. Almost no improvements are discernible in public services over the period while most have gone downhill, the result of politburo-style management and misuse of public funds at every level, much of it from incompetence, the rest from jobs-for-the-tribe. Snouts in the trough doesn’t begin to cover it.

Once again a Labour Government will leave office having wrecked the country.

* In 1929 we had the British version of the Great Depression to look forward to.
* In the late 1940s it was by restricting markets from operating at all while Germany and Japan freed up their workforces and built the foundations for their current strength.
* In the 1970s, Britain was placed at the mercy of the IMF, followed by the Winter of Discontent.
* This time, the nation has been hollowed out, its vital wealth-creating engine crushed. A decade of its earnings simply squandered on a whimsical mountain of public services that struggle to operate on any level.

It didn’t help that this time Labour was given three Parliaments to wreak its usual havoc. How did that happen? By guile, neglecting the truth, cooking the books, making false claims about almost everything … and getting away with it thanks to friends in the media who complacently turned blind eyes to the accumulating shambles.

Will Brown be impeached, do you suppose?

Do elephants ski?

John Evans

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