David Cameron: Saviour Of Conservatism

Alan Duncan has come out with a whole new line of attack against the right: YOU'RE STOOPID!

Of course, I mean 'new' in the sense of 'used in every second Guardian editorial since 1974'. At least this kills the myth that the whole 'Nu Tory' thing is just tactical, and they're actually all rock-ribbed conservatives. Unless there's a previously-unsuspected pro-criminal voting bloc out there, they come out with this sort of thing because it's who they are.

Still, even leaving aside wider issues, I have two questions:

• Are we sure people on the right who criticise Duncan are still just anti-gay bigots?
• How does this new direction for policy mesh with his plans for capital punishment for people who oppose gay marriage?

The usual suspects will no doubt point out that Duncan doesn't really think critics of gay marriage should be murdered. True enough, but then again, I doubt he really thinks the problem with the current legal system is that the courts are just too punitive.

There's simply no way you can look at what's been happening in this country since 1997 and honestly conclude that the problem is that a legal system too focused on punishment. Duncan's comments are literally senseless, but that's the thing: Duncan, just like his boss and the rest of the Nu Tory face cards is a fully-paid post-modern politician for whom actual reality is just one of a number of competing narratives.

Forget the 'Heir to Blair' thing, the real comparison is with the Obamamessiah. Consider this exert from the Great Steyn:

The defining moment of [Obama's] doomed attempt to prop up Martha Coakley was his peculiar obsession with Scott Brown's five-year-old pickup:

"Forget the ads. Everybody can run slick ads," the president told an audience of out-of-state students at a private school. "Forget the truck. Everybody can buy a truck."

How they laughed! But what was striking was the thinking behind Obama's line: that anyone can buy a truck for a slick ad, that Brown's pickup was a prop – like the herd of cows Al Gore rented for a pastoral backdrop when he launched his first presidential campaign...

Howard Fineman, the increasingly loopy editor of the increasingly doomed Newsweek, took it a step further. The truck wasn't just any old prop but a very particular kind: "In some places, there are codes, there are images," he told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. "You know, there are pickup trucks, you could say there was a racial aspect to it one way or another."

Ah, yes. Scott Brown has over 200,000 miles on his odometer. Man, he's racked up a lot of coded racism on that rig. But that's easy to do in notorious cross-burning KKK swamps like suburban Massachusetts.

Whenever aspiring writers ask me for advice, I usually tell 'em this:

Don't just write there, do something. Learn how to shingle a roof, or tap-dance, or raise sled dogs. Because if you don't do anything, you wind up like Obama and Fineman – men for whom words are props and codes and metaphors but no longer expressive of anything real.

Cameron and pals don't come out with this rubbish because they believe it, they come out with it because they believe it's what politicians are supposed to say. It's entirely self-referential.

But here's the thing: is that really such a surprise? Yes, the Tory Party is an arrogant, narcissistic mess of smug, incestuous weasels with nary the slightest interest in carrying out their supposed mission of promoting conservative values, but you know what that reminds me of? Every other quasi-governmental body in Britain. The Tories are the perfect example of everything real conservatives have ever said about the corrosive effects of the state on anything it touches.

On the other hand, who cares? I've pointed out before Cameron's eerie ability to not only miss the bandwagon, but to get run over by it coming back the other way, still, recent events have taken that to the next level. ManBearPig must be destroyed!

Tough luck if you were hoping to vote for a mainstream party that didn't support massive tax hikes, crony capitalism and a bureaucrat peering over every shoulder. Instead, you can vote for the People's Front of Warmenism, or the Warmenist People's Front. Either way, you're going to take it in the shorts. Except... it's all going horribly wrong.

Then there's the Great Republic. Back in November 2008, the usual suspects were assuring us that the ascension of the Obamammessiah meant that the Republican Party was DOA. Fourteen months later and its the Democrats that are scrambling for the lifeboats. Crunch question: did this turnaround happen because the Republican Party finally got its act together, or because it utterly failed to? Isn't the whole Tea Party movement a symptom of public contempt for a Republican Establishment that seems almost Cameronesque in its contempt for the ordinary voter?

What links the Tea Partiers in the US with the anti-Gerbil Worming movement in Britannia is that they're both genuine grass roots movements that have risen in the face of utter contempt from the political classes. Well, that and they're both winning. They're setting the political agenda even as the alleged realists like Cameron explain that all the right can really do is bend over and take it like a man. What definition of 'realism' are we using here?

Is his own way, Cameron is exactly what the conservative movement needs. There was always something deeply unconservative about the idea that we could just vote every now and then for a bunch of politico-luvvies down in London and hope they'd sort everything out, and now Cameron's sneering contempt for the conservative base has rammed home just how absurd that was. Leaving aside you-know-who (who the Nu Tories hate anyway), what arguments have the Tories won in the last forty years? Nada! The Tories have always been useless at actual conservatism but now they've finally gone the whole way and elected a man who doesn't even bother pretending to try. Let these elitist dolts disappear up their own narratives, the real battlefield for conservatism is out in the country.