Bullingdon Boy David Cameron’s suffering that congenital political disease known as a thin skin.
The upper-class warrior who’d shower public handouts on his rich friends – inheritance tax cuts, married couple allowances favouring the wealthy, abolishing Labour’s 50p top rate – doesn’t like to be laughed at. He takes himself very seriously and demands that others do the same.
Cameron reacted to Gordon Brown’s at the Conservative leader and his chum from his old school, tax-dodging
mulitmillionaire Zac Goldsmith, devised policies “on the playing fields of Eton” as if it was a call for the jobless to ransack White’s in St James’ clubland.
I rarely agree with Peter Mandelson, but the lord of all he surveys was on the money to pinpoint Cameron’s sense of entitlement as one of the reasons for the sulking Tory leader’s preposterous claim to be victim of a “petty, spiteful and stupid” attack. The butt of a good joke, more like.
Cameron has enjoyed an easy ride to the gates of Downing Street. Eton, Oxford and the Buller were followed by Buckingham Palace putting in a call to land him a job in Tory headquarters, before mummy-in-law secured Dave a much better-paid post as a television spin-doctor.
But the other, more important reason for touchy Cameron’s long whinge is the chief Con knows his life of privilege is an Achilles’ heel when he’s championing policies to redistribute cash from the poor to the rich.
Labour lost the Crewe and Nantwich by-election not because a lad was dressed in a top hat. Labour was defeated because Brown had failed to compensate losers of the 10p tax axe, and food and fuel prices were soaring.
Cameron made a great deal of the toff attack because he wanted to neuter it, but his policies make it relevant – voters recognising Citizen Dave as a well-heeled fake.
“It’s not where you’re from”, said Cameron, “it’s where you are going.”
Quite true and it’s because we know where Cameron’s going that his silver spoon life is relevant.
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Human cash register Tony Blair has a lot to answer for. Iraq jostles with failing to control the banksters at the top of the list of policy mistakes. Future historians in 100 years may remember the first three-term Labour Government for two very wrong reasons.
The Chilcot inquiry into Iraq is turning into one of the best free shows in London – the case for war not fit to fill a sexed-up dodgy dossier.
I’ve no time for those claiming they were duped. It was clear back in 2002 and early 2003 an invasion was illegal – tin-pot tyrant Saddam Hussein an evil dictator (like our great Middle East ally, the Saudi King), but no threat to neighbouring states, let alone the British bases in Cyprus that gullible media claimed were 45 minutes from a deadly chemical-carrying missile.
And those historians who consider Iraq to be the second biggest mistake will pick as the first the great global financial collapse and Britain’s unwitting role by failing to tame a reckless City of London.
The failure to regulate the casino capitalists, cowed by financiers who issued empty threats to flee the country, displayed a lack of nerve that, alas, runs through the last 12 years.
Of course it’s not all one-way traffic and Blair can take his fair share of the credit for winning three general elections. The Tories were so bust in 1997, however, I suspect dear old Michael Foot would’ve triumphed at the polls as Labour Party leader.
Labour can point to many reforms that have improved life in this country – from the minimum wage and tax credits to a better National Health Service, the Human Rights Act, civil partnerships and 101 other policies. But Gordon Brown, Jack Straw and others deserve to shoulder the blame for what went wrong as well as what was right.
However, my beef this month with the moneymaking machine that is Tony Blair is the bankrupt state in which he left the Labour Party. The then Prime Minister and his
chief fundraiser Michael Levy mortgaged Labour’s future to beat Michael Howard’s Conservatives by a narrow three points in 2005.
The police found no evidence that merited criminal charges in the cash-for-honours investigation, yet the £12 million in loans – the bulk of which must be repaid – frightened away donors and pushed the party deep into the red, financially if not politically.
Every Labour activist, candidate and MP complaining about a lack of organisation and support should blame Blair. The party is operating on a shoestring,
General secretary Ray Collins is performing miracles to keep the show on the road. Without Unite’s loot, the next election would be over, lost, finished. Instead a string of opinion polls show Brown closing on David Cameron.
The Tories will massively outspend Labour in the campaign, buying every billboard and taking out so many adverts it’ll be impossible to open a newspaper or watch a film at the cinema without seeing Cameron propaganda. Thanks, Tony.
