Kevin Maguire – As I please
HIS personality is treated as fair game, a stick to beat him with. Political opponents present his very birth as a reason he’s unfit to lead. Digs are made about his schooldays, a bit of a swot whose parents ensured he enjoyed privileges beyond the reach of others. At university, the club he joined and interests pursued set him apart from most other students. To his intense irritation, his life outside Westminster continues today to be combed over for tit-bits to paint him as other-worldly, evidence he’s not like you or me.
Gordon Brown is constantly criticised by Tories for being a Scot, so one of the great big fat juicy hypocrisies of our era is the Conservative whinge over toff attacks on David Cameron. Leading an opposition that continually assaults the Prime Minister over who he is rather than what he does, Cameron going so far as to call him a weirdo. Shadow Chancellor George Osborne, suggesting he’s autistic, is hardly fighting on the moral high ground. Brown may have been a university Labour club geek instead of a Bullingdon Club Hooray Henry, Edinburgh not offering Edwardian tailcoats as a form of self-expression.
Tories didn’t feel queasy at sending teams of butlers to pursue wealthy Shaun Woodward for the cameras when a Conservative married to an heiress – sound familiar, Mr Cameron? – defected to Labour, opening the door for the young David to succeed him in Witney. Putting a picture of the home of a by-election opponent on a leaflet? How terrible, how unprincipled. Oh, hang on a minute. Wasn’t that done against Labour’s Robert Evans in Brent four years ago? Indeed it was. Denis MacShane was wrongly accused of owning a big house in Geneva. A bagpiper stalked Brown to remind voters he’s Scottish. John Prescott has spent a lifetime in politics enduring class attacks (and delivering his fair share).
Labour played the class card clumsily in Crewe and Nantwich, but the Tory focus on top hats and mansions is less to do with the by-election than an attempt to ring-fence Cameron whose background, and continued other-worldliness including membership of the male-only gentlemen’s club Whites, remains an Achilles’ heel. I know from the personal complaints how vulnerable he feels. This isn’t about name-calling, but exposing Cameron as an out-of-touch leader, a Conservative politician who remains a Bullingdon Club snob at heart and who doesn’t have at heart the interests of most voters.
Every now and then,we catch a glimpse of the real Cameron behind that smile. Take the two ambulance crew feted by Cameron in public for ferrying his severely disabled son to school everyday. When the couple were made redundant, the Tory leader hailed them as unsung heroes in the newspapers and landed a few blows on Government health policy. The pair were invited to chez Cameron for a drink, then ushered to the door while other more favoured guests stayed for dinner – a bad taste left in the mouths of two workers who complained they’d been shabbily exploited.
Then there was the well-sourced Sunday Mirror tale of how Cameron scolded his daughter for looking like she’d been brought up on a council estate over her messy hair when she was to be an extra in a carefully spun ITV “news” item on life around the Tory leader’s breakfast table. A chap who will invite a film crew to show the country he offers the kids a choice of Cheerios or Shreddies is clearly anxious to present an image of “Mr Ordinary Dad”. No wonder he want to keep under wraps that he’s a direct descendant of William IV and a distant relative of the Queen who secured his first job in Conservative Central Office when some flunkey in Buckingham Palace rang to put in a good word to pull a few strings.
Blue-blooded Cameron’s life of privilege wins acceptance in Whites, but will raise questions in the public mind. The first Old Etonian to lead the Tories since Alec Douglas Home retired hurt 44 years ago and, as fellow OE Nicholas Soames was overheard braying, “the old order is reasserting itself”, seeks to use Crewe’s Edward Timpson as a human shield.
Timpson isn’t a toff. He’s wealthy, but not really a toff. The flawed by-election strategy was to get the discussion away from 10p tax. In didn’t do that, as the result attests. The toff attacks were originally devised to draw a dividing line between Timpson and a former Rolls-Royce worker who, luckily for him, never won Labour’s selection. When the standard bearer was Labour blue-blood Tamsin Dunwoody, hoping to inherit her mother’s seat, it couldn’t work.
But the David Cameron who tries so hard to appear Mr Ordinary Dad is a toff and in a general election campaign, there will be a time and place to link his background to what he’d do in Downing Street. And if Labour calibrates it correctly, it will, as Cameron fears, cost the Tories a few votes.
