Old Meme: Now that the divinely-inspired leadership of The Dave has cleansed the Tory Party of reactionary elements, nothing can stop him crushing Prime Mentalist Gordon McDoom.
New Meme: There's no way even a God-like individual like Cameron could be expected to beat a master politician like Gordon Brown while elements on the right were still sulking about trivia.
All things considered, for a group of people who supposedly champion individual responsibility, there's an awful lot of victimhood floating round the Tories right now. Actually, that's Clue Number One right there: all this talk of how they've been unfairly deprived of victory by people voting for someone else does suggest a certain sense of entitlement.
Spin to the contrary, if large parts of the conservative base treat the Tories with contempt, it's purely because they sense the feeling's mutual. Eliminating large chunks of the conservative base from the Tory Party was an explicit objective of Cameronism, for example Party Chairman Francis Maude claimed the Tories had to 'lose twenty-five to gain fifty' (so at least they got half-way there).
To the point, these missing voters didn't leave the Tory Party, the Tories left them, then threw a brick through their window. To put it another way, if the Tories now had a 100 seat majority, the same people currently raging about UKIP would be citing it as proof of Cameron's status as the World's Smartest Man.
No Tory leader in history has exercised as much personal control over the Party as Cameron. In some respects it was quite impressive to turn the world's oldest party into a personality cult but it does make it hard for his acolytes to now claim he's a hapless victim of circumstance. In reality, Cameron's strategy failed in both quantitative and qualitative terms.
Consider the gay movement. Short of having Graham Norton sodomise him with a crucifix live on stage, Cameron couldn't have done more appease them, and that brilliant strategy was how the Tories ended up with grand total of 9% of their votes - which is to say, 9% of 2.8% of the voting population. Given those numbers, it might have been simpler just to buy them all tickets for Kylie's next gig.
Then there's the Cameron's Clones on the A-List. Oops. And an extra 'oops' for Chief Crony Joanne Cash who, lest we forget, had The Dave personally run interference for her. Guess she needed those dinosaurs after all.
See, this is the whole thing with Cameronism: they never argued policy, instead the whole alibi for these people was that they'd unlocked the secret of electability. Everyone who pointed out that the Tory program was an incoherent mess was denounced as a, well, dinosaur who needed to get with program. That excuse only works if you actually get elected, not if you screw up and whine about other people cruelly voting against you for no reason at all.
That's Clue Number Two: the collective look of bemusement that's settled on the Tories while they grapple with the whole 'voting your ideals' thing ('OK, they believe in traditional British values but what's their real agenda')?
That's the real knock on Cameronism. Some in the Tory grass roots may have believed that Cameronism merely meant adopting a few fashionably post-ideological poses, but after five years of Cameron, the Tory Party is so hollowed out that that when they encounter people that really do believe what they say, they're completely thrown.
So it would be for a Tory government. The Tories have relentlessly triangulated and trimmed their positions down to vanishing point. Cameronism sees the Tory Party's role as merely quibbling over the specifics even as it implicitly accepts the left's assumptions about all the big issues. It means accepting as inevitable, and even desirable, an ever-growing state, taking in more and more tax and producing ever more regulations, bureaucrats and bottom inspectors. And UKIP voters are supposed to feel guilty for opposing that?
New Meme: There's no way even a God-like individual like Cameron could be expected to beat a master politician like Gordon Brown while elements on the right were still sulking about trivia.
All things considered, for a group of people who supposedly champion individual responsibility, there's an awful lot of victimhood floating round the Tories right now. Actually, that's Clue Number One right there: all this talk of how they've been unfairly deprived of victory by people voting for someone else does suggest a certain sense of entitlement.
Spin to the contrary, if large parts of the conservative base treat the Tories with contempt, it's purely because they sense the feeling's mutual. Eliminating large chunks of the conservative base from the Tory Party was an explicit objective of Cameronism, for example Party Chairman Francis Maude claimed the Tories had to 'lose twenty-five to gain fifty' (so at least they got half-way there).
To the point, these missing voters didn't leave the Tory Party, the Tories left them, then threw a brick through their window. To put it another way, if the Tories now had a 100 seat majority, the same people currently raging about UKIP would be citing it as proof of Cameron's status as the World's Smartest Man.
No Tory leader in history has exercised as much personal control over the Party as Cameron. In some respects it was quite impressive to turn the world's oldest party into a personality cult but it does make it hard for his acolytes to now claim he's a hapless victim of circumstance. In reality, Cameron's strategy failed in both quantitative and qualitative terms.
Consider the gay movement. Short of having Graham Norton sodomise him with a crucifix live on stage, Cameron couldn't have done more appease them, and that brilliant strategy was how the Tories ended up with grand total of 9% of their votes - which is to say, 9% of 2.8% of the voting population. Given those numbers, it might have been simpler just to buy them all tickets for Kylie's next gig.
Then there's the Cameron's Clones on the A-List. Oops. And an extra 'oops' for Chief Crony Joanne Cash who, lest we forget, had The Dave personally run interference for her. Guess she needed those dinosaurs after all.
See, this is the whole thing with Cameronism: they never argued policy, instead the whole alibi for these people was that they'd unlocked the secret of electability. Everyone who pointed out that the Tory program was an incoherent mess was denounced as a, well, dinosaur who needed to get with program. That excuse only works if you actually get elected, not if you screw up and whine about other people cruelly voting against you for no reason at all.
That's Clue Number Two: the collective look of bemusement that's settled on the Tories while they grapple with the whole 'voting your ideals' thing ('OK, they believe in traditional British values but what's their real agenda')?
That's the real knock on Cameronism. Some in the Tory grass roots may have believed that Cameronism merely meant adopting a few fashionably post-ideological poses, but after five years of Cameron, the Tory Party is so hollowed out that that when they encounter people that really do believe what they say, they're completely thrown.
So it would be for a Tory government. The Tories have relentlessly triangulated and trimmed their positions down to vanishing point. Cameronism sees the Tory Party's role as merely quibbling over the specifics even as it implicitly accepts the left's assumptions about all the big issues. It means accepting as inevitable, and even desirable, an ever-growing state, taking in more and more tax and producing ever more regulations, bureaucrats and bottom inspectors. And UKIP voters are supposed to feel guilty for opposing that?
2 comments:
"All things considered, for a group of people who supposedly champion individual responsibility, there's an awful lot of victimhood floating round the Tories right now."
Indeed. But iy's a measure of the Cameroid's grip on the party that they haven't turned on him.
Yet.
They will. The things government has to do in the next little while are hard and painful. You think Deputy PM Clegg will sign off on any of them?
This cobbled-together Frankenstein's government is going to be utterly useless.
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