Britannia Radio

08 May 2010 9:52 PM

If you thought those female vampires on Dr Who were scary...

The Tories lost the Election. Let me say that again, as so many of their media toadies are pretending otherwise. The Tories lost the Election. There’s no way round this.

In British Elections, you only win if you get a majority in the House of Commons. They couldn’t obtain that majority. Winning 36 per cent of 65 per cent of the electorate (I make that a ‘mandate’ from less than a quarter of the voting public) does not confer a moral right to rule.

They go on about how they gained a lot of seats. But that is only because they lost so many under John Major (who is now back among us from his 13-year lecture tour, grinning at Mr Cameron’s elbow). How could this failure have happened?

The Tories had millions of pounds from Lord Ashcroft, poured into every winnable seat. They had the benevolent neutrality of the BBC and the fierce support of the Murdoch Press.

They were up against the worst British Government of modern times, led by a man so unattractive, unloved and incompetent that a well-briefed Teletubby could have beaten him. Yet still they lost. How could this be?

The glaring truth is that this most feeble and incompetent Opposition was and is not fit for its purpose. It was and is a deeply cynical fake. The mere fact that Mr Cameron could, on Friday afternoon, publicly open coalition talks with the Liberal Democrats should tell us all we need to know.

Only a few days ago, the costly Tory propaganda machine was overheating with the strain of shouting at us that Nick Clegg was a mad anti-British Leftist and his party a wild fringe organisation. Now the same machine is leaking that Mr Clegg may be offered a Cabinet post in a Tory-Liberal coalition.

It seems to me obvious which one of these positions represents the truth about Mr Cameron’s Tories, an unprincipled rabble of office-seekers who would do almost anything for a red box and a Government car.

If you doubt me, look at what Mr Cameron did in the final days of the campaign, as the private polls warned that his long-anticipated majority was vanishing.

While he turned up the anti-Liberal rhetoric, his actions were radically Leftist. He ruthlessly sacked Philip Lardner – a parliamentary candidate who dared to express support for Section 28, the Thatcher-era legislation banning the promotion of homosexuality.

And he said he was looking at the case for changing the law so that homosexual civil partnerships could be ‘called and classified as marriage’.

At the same time as he made these real concessions to the wild Left, he made wretched gestures to conservatives. He said he was ‘sorry’ for the way he had sneered at supporters of grammar schools – but not sorry for abandoning them.

And he regretted saying he was the ‘Heir to Blair’. But he didn’t, and doesn’t, regret thinking it .

And when you have a chance to make the acquaintance of the massed ranks of politically-

correct young women he has inserted into Tory safe seats, you will find them nearly as frightening as the battalions of female vampires now menacing Dr Who.

The truth is that the Cameron Tories are really not significantly different from the Liberal Democrats. Many of their new MPs are interchangeable with Mr Clegg’s and Mr Brown’s. Their supposed disagreements on the EU and immigration are empty posing, on both sides.

If some form of proportional representation is the non-negotiable price of a deal, can we really be sure that Mr Cameron – he of the fragile cast-iron guarantees – won’t grant it so he can sit in Downing Street?

Well, this nasty stitch-up can be upset by only one thing – a revolt by the remaining true conservatives now hiding inside Mr Cameron’s party. Under William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith, the Tory Party’s liberal faction worked with all its might to undermine and wreck everything they did.

By contrast, old-fashioned Tories have until now generously refused to rock Mr Cameron’s boat. That loyalty was always misplaced. Now it is positively dangerous. Time for a Tory split.

Surely the cane is better than classroom anarchy

The gruesome case of the teacher Peter Harvey, deliberately enraged by a classroom full of feral savages, then publicly persecuted by our boneheaded injustice system, continues to haunt me.

Here is a gifted and conscientious man, admired by many of his former pupils, forced to earn his bread by daily facing a version of Hell.

Can you imagine being a dedicated teacher, who loves his subject and wants to communicate it, spending your days with loping, yelling, sneering louts, male and female, who – the products of our rich, indulgent, post-marriage, post-Christian society – have no idea how to behave and no wish to learn?

I think I can just begin to picture it, but only just. Mr Harvey, whose home life had also been visited with unhappiness of various kinds, seems then to have fallen into the hands of the medical profession.

Reports say he was prescribed ‘medication’ for ‘depression’ – the appalling widespread state-sponsored drugging of the unhappy, the nasty and unpredictable side effects of which are a great unexplored scandal.

It is one of the many ways the authorities avoid doing anything serious about the horrors that the liberal elite have unleashed among us.

I want to know if he was taking this ‘medication’ at the time he snapped, and what it was. If he was, I doubt very much if he can be held legally responsible for his actions. I very much regret that he was persuaded to plead guilty to anything.

As far as I am concerned, he was provoked beyond endurance by people who, when they grow up, will be well qualified to act as concentration camp guards.

Who, reading this story, can honestly say that this foul, cruel chaos erupting in our classrooms is preferable to corporal punishment, which we are told was so wicked? The authorities are close to achieving a total ban on smacking children.

But we live in fear of mercilessly violent teenagers. And nobody sees the connection.

The alleged volcanic ash cloud is still lurking on our northern shores.

Or so we are told. I am amazed at the credulity of my media colleagues about this dubious threat. The supposedly dangerous level of ash in the atmosphere is so tiny (two times ten to the power of minus three grammes per cubic metre – sorry about the foreign measurements but my maths isn’t up to converting this tiny figure into fractions of ounces and cubic feet) that I’m surprised any plane can take off within two miles of a full ashtray.

I shall continue to investigate the science on which this state-sponsored panic is based. Because I fear that, unless sceptical light is shone on it, we will soon face a repeat of the lunatic April shutdown.

The other day I resolved never again to use an automated checkout at any supermarket. I’d rather wait for a human being. I am sick of being asked to co-operate in making my fellow-creatures unemployed.

May 2010 11:52 AM

Well, yes, I was right

I shall be very brief, and will save a more detailed response to events for my column in the Mail on Sunday. But I should make two points. First, that the basis of my argument has always been that the Tory Party could not win another general election, however it contorts itself.

A party which cannot, even with the aid of millions of pounds of expensive propaganda and organisation, and with much of the media either on its side or neutralised, defeat Gordon Brown's Labour Party at the nadir of its unpopularity is plainly not fit to be the Opposition. I am sorry that we have had to wait all these years to demonstrate this blindingly obvious fact in practice. I do hope, amid all the twaddle now being talked by Tory supporters, that people recognise this is the essential fact about this election. David Cameron's Tories did not - could not - win it. Bizarrely, some people seem to think that they have won it. Sorry, but you have to win a majority to win the election. And they haven't.

This is because the Tory Party is forever a poisoned brand in much of the country, and also because it is an unsustainable coalition of irreconcilable forces, which can make gains of one kind only by losing substantial support elsewhere. Many readers seem to have missed this point - made in my original articles on the subject nearly seven years ago.

When I wrote these articles in late 2003, I was actually trying to start a debate among political conservatives about how to get rid of the Tories and begin a new movement which could defeat New Labour. Had anyone listened at the time, we might be there now. The defeat of New Labour, not just symbolically but in terms of policy, was and remains my purpose. The response of official Toryism and of the Tory media classes was total silence, after which I coincidentally found myself being smeared and undermined in various spiteful ways. This strengthened my determination to continue. And for some time the argument prospered.

Then came David Cameron. And the 'argument' against me then changed direction. I was smugly told again and again that I was hopelessly wrong, and that Mr Cameron was 'bound to win' this election. I explained carefully why this was not necessarily so. And I was told, again and again that I was wrong. Well, sorry, but I was right. I won't collect the lunch I'm now owed by one of my critics, or the other bet that I made with a leading commentator. I'm not vindictive. But I would very much appreciate some recognition that - as I insisted - conventional wisdom and received opinion were wrong. The implications of this are of course large. But perhaps only a Trotskyist sleeper can grasp them.

06 May 2010 4:33 PM

The Last Question...not answered, barely asked. Campaign ends with Dull Thud

Yesterday I travelled to Bristol to catch David Cameron's last public appearance of this election campaign. The cold truth had sunk in, that he would not be holding any more press conferences. He has held precisely one such event during the election campaign, if you don't count the Manifesto launch, which is astonishing when you compare it with the near-daily appearances of all major party leaders in every other election I've covered, going back to 1983. Next time, I don't suppose there'll be any, the last chance for critical questioning of would-be premiers will have gone forever, and the whole thing will have been entirely transferred to the sealed, safe world of TV, where wisdom is always conventional and thinking is always received.

The event was, like most of these things, closed to the public, who passed near it in their thousands all unaware that it was about to happen, or happening, or over. They could see it on TV later. It took place in what used once to be Bristol Railway Station and was until recently a Museum of the British Empire (has it closed? Were all the exhibits stored so Mr Cameron could use the room?), close to the current Temple Meads station. Now it smelled of popcorn, being distributed to the 'Young People' who had somehow been persuaded to come (how do they do this? What cause do they think they are supporting?), and was full of the costly paraphernalia of a modern election campaign, as originally used by Bill Clinton in 1992, copied by the Blair machine in 1997, and copied again by the Cameroons now. It's all backdrops, lighting, stage managers, adolescent music, smiles and slogans.

The 'audience' were party activists. The youngest and coolest were allowed (by a stern fierce woman in boots, who carefully selected them from those present) to take their places directly behind where the Dear Leader planned to stand, in a fenced-in enclosure inside the great empty shed (and it was mostly empty - no attempt had been made to fill the vast room, as that might have entailed letting ordinary voters in) so as to be in TV shot. The older and less beautiful were kept waiting. Popular music of some kind roared ceaselessly from loudspeakers. Expensively-printed placards were pressed on the throng (someone tried to give one to me) bearing vacuous slogans about 'Change'. In a vaguely North Korean style, the invited crowd were encouraged to wave them aloft to show their enthusiasm. I climbed over the fence and inserted myself among the supporters.

I had a couple of interesting conversations - the response when I said that I hoped to see the Tory Party defeated and destroyed were wonderfully British and polite, of the 'Oh, really, how awfully interesting' sort, and one nice person, after reminiscing about her excellent grammar school education, said her ideal politician was Frank Field. What these people see in David Cameron I just do not know. But then conversation was made impossible, as the ghastly music was turned up, and we were then compelled to endure a grotesquely dishonest and crude Election Broadcast, which actually contrived to suggest that the Tories had been against the Iraq War. It all reminded me of the similarly despairing last few days of the 1997 campaign, during which the Blairites unleashed electronic slurry of similar quality and honesty - and nobody cared, or was ashamed.

And then we had William Hague, barnstorming (that man could storm a barn in his sleep) but a sad husk of his former self, and then Sayeeda Warsi, with her special brand of Northern Mateyness - during this period Mrs Cameron, smiling determinedly, appeared in the throng. And then at last, the presence, and an awful speech in which the audience were invited to chant 'Change!', (a word which instantly invites the question 'What sort of change?', but in this campaign that is never asked) and once again nobody was embarrassed or ashamed.

As Mr Cameron left, I scrambled back over the fence (amazing for a man of my age) and caught up with him, falling in step beside him (he gave me the fake-cheery greeting he - and Mr Blair before him - have both perfected for such joyless encounters). ‘Mr Cameron’, I began politely, ‘I'd like to ask you about your expenses...’

Mr Cameron mumbled something exasperated, along the lines of 'oh, not that again' (I cannot swear to his exact words, but you get the drift), but the real answer came from the shaven-headed bouncer who was escorting him and who deftly, with the minimum necessary violence, shoved me out of the way. I challenged his right to do so, of course, and he growled back over his shoulder 'You were in his way'. This wasn't true, as I was beside the Dear Leader, my short legs struggling to stay in step with DC's long ones, or I had been till I was pushed aside. In the old days, in 1992, I was able to pursue Neil Kinnock in the same fashion. As a result, on that long-ago occasion, I was enveloped in a scrum of Labour apparatchiks - with my coat and scarf on the floor and my papers scattered in a stream behind me. I ended up being chivalrously rescued by the Labour leader himself from his over-wrought aides. Mr Kinnock actually put a protective arm around me (yes, he did, and I honour him for it. He's a perfectly decent human being for all his failings). But in those days it was just citizen versus citizen (or subject versus subject, as I prefer) , not subject versus grandee with police escort.

In these days of 'Al Qaeda' and 'security', men of power have heavies who can protect them from questions on the pretext of guarding them from danger, and I was probably inches from arrest under some anti-terror statute. (I suppose these bald characters in tight suits must have been police officers, though they made no attempt to identify themselves as such).

As I made my way home on the train, I looked out through the dusk at the lovely prospect of the Vale of the White Horse - the ancient horse itself just visible on the line of the hills in the summer twilight, the graceful tower of Uffington church rising from among the trees, and consoled myself with the thought that much of England still exists as our grandparents knew it. But for how much longer? And how much of it is outward show, with the inward parts removed?

When I reached the office this morning, I was alerted to Mrs Theresa May's astonishing 'Contract for Equalities' (do please Google it. The full, appalling text is available). I've pointed out before that Mrs May is the Tory Party's Harriet Harman, and here's the proof for those that doubt me. This is the Tory party's final instrument of surrender to Political Correctness. The great John O' Sullivan says in this morning's Spectator that when he first saw it he thought it was a clever UKIP forgery. But no, it's genuine, including a half-promise to 'call and classify' Homosexual Civil Partnerships as marriages.

As I've said elsewhere, there's a case for such measures and many people want them. The two left-wing parties adequately (more than adequately) represent this. But there's also a rational and civilised case against them, and many who don't want them. If the Conservative Party won't stand for conservative people, then what is it for?

One last thing. ‘Mike Everett’, on an earlier thread, asked the following question: ‘IF (big IF) Peter Hitchens was a cunning long-term-sleeping infiltrating left wing agent/5th columnist - as some have previously theorised on here - how would his behaviour be much different to that which we actually witness?’

It is, to anyone who knows anything about me or my political development, a deeply stupid question, bordering on the actively moronic. It is also - given my past and patient responses to this suggestion, in which I have explained why it cannot be true, and explained that my personal experience of the consequences of Marxism have made it impossible for me to be beguiled by this poisonous tripe - wearisome, personally spiteful and extraordinarily ill-mannered. Which is why I am tempted to treat it as if I had just scraped it off the sole of my shoe and to put it where I would put such material.

However, let me put this to Mr ‘Everett.’

Why on Earth would a revolutionary object to, or seek to prevent, the election of a Tory government committed - as Mr Cameron is - to the very Gramscian agenda of social and cultural revolution for which Trotskyists have been striving in this country since 1968? Wouldn't it be the supreme triumph of the Long March of the Institutions to have a Tory Frontbencher putting her signature to a document such as ‘A Contract for Equalities’, which I and my York International Socialist contemporaries in 1970 would have found rather startlingly radical?

05 May 2010 4:40 PM

Saying 'Sorry' is so easy to do

My congratulations to my old friend Amanda Platell, who has secured, for the Daily Mail, what seems to me to be the most interesting interview that David Cameron has ever given.

I may be flattering myself here, but I can't help wondering if Mr Cameron's willingness to talk to Amanda on Monday had anything to do with a Tory desire to rebut - in a conservative sister newspaper - my attack on the Cameron project in the Mail on Sunday. Amanda has been quite waspish about the Tory leader, though she is of course much nicer to meet than I am.

Mr Cameron, seeking to win round Amanda and the many like her who have been put off by his open scorn for traditional conservatives, adopts a penitent posture in this encounter. But is he really sorry for what he did? I don't think so. He's only prepared to be regretful about the way he did it. And no wonder. His high-handed, aggressive liberalism was aimed at winning him millions of Lib Dem voters who have now chosen Cleggomania instead. It undoubtedly cost him lots of votes he would now very gladly have back. In my view, he was showing his true colours, and those votes shouldn't return just because he's now belatedly prepared to turn the charm beacon in a rightward direction.

Here are some examples of this 'sorry for the way I said it - but not sorry for what I did' attitude.

Grammar schools:

‘I will accept that I got it wrong in the row on grammar schools. They are excellent schools, all 164 of them, and under the Conservative Party they will prosper and flourish.

'I do accept that in the language I used I didn't show enough sensitivity to people who'd been to grammar schools, who liked grammar schools, who thought they were great agents of social mobility.

'I was trying to make sure we got on to the next target, which is: how do we have good schools right across the country?’

PH comments: This sounds good, but it wasn't the *existing* grammar schools that were (and are) the problem. The enemies of education hope to pick them off quietly in time, they are hopelessly besieged and oversubscribed by parents trying to take advantage of them, and they are irrelevant to most people, who have no hope of getting their children into them. What was at issue was the possibility of creating many more new ones in areas where they are badly needed and where they don't exist. Tory policy, of keeping those that exist, and allowing one or two more in selective areas, doesn't answer this need at all. Mr Cameron's party, under his leadership, voted in early 2006 for a Labour measure which made new grammar schools illegal (Mr Cameron himself was absent from the vote, I'm not sure why). So they cannot now do this without a major u-turn, as Labour and the Lib Dems would undoubtedly point out if they tried.

It wasn't his rudeness (he called grammar school supporters 'deluded') so much as his anti-grammar dogma that was - and is - the problem. His fabled new Swedish-style schools will all have to be comprehensives, for instance, if any of them ever gets built. So what good will that do?

Amanda rightly put the 'deluded' quotation to him: ‘By branding them “deluded” wasn't he guilty of gesture politics at its worst - betraying a core Tory belief to pander to the Left?

‘Cameron erupts again. “No! Absolutely not. No, no, no. And I'll tell you why. I am passionate about good education. My children are at a state school, and I want them to go to a great state secondary school.” ’

PH comments: I'd mention here that Mr Cameron's children (by virtue of Mr and Mrs Cameron's commitment to a certain London church, itself interesting given that they maintain a large weekend house, which we have all helped to pay for, 70 miles from London) are at a wholly untypical, heavily-oversubscribed Church of England primary school. Most of us have no access to such schools for our children. Mr Cameron could perfectly well afford fees for private schools for his children.

By sending them to this state school, he is quite possibly depriving families less well off than him of their only chance of a good primary education.

Why is this supposed to be virtuous? We all know (thanks to the actions of New Labour) that the children of the powerful can be wangled into one of the very few good state secondary schools in London. As a non-Roman Catholic, and a non-resident of the tiny catchment areas of Camden School for Girls, or William Ellis School, this will be much harder for Mr Cameron than it was for the New Labour elite. But once again, the religious or postcode route is closed to most of the rest of us, across the whole country. So why is it supposed to be praiseworthy? I do not think Mr Cameron is planning to send his children to the sorts of bog-standard comprehensive available to the great majority of voters. But in that case, does he really believe his plans have much to offer those voters?

Mr Cameron told Amanda: 'I want discipline and well-ordered classrooms and a head teacher who knows my children's names.’

PH comments: Well, so do I, and so do all of us, but the problem is always 'How do we get this to happen?', and many people - me among them - believe that selection is the way, plus legislation to return authority (including corporal punishment) to teachers. How is he going to achieve this in schools, called ‘Good’ by OFSTED, in which teachers are persecuted by unruly pupils?

But there is an apology. Does it matter? I don't think so.

Mr Cameron: 'But over grammar schools, did I use the right language? No. Did I upset people in a way I shouldn't? Yes.’

PH comments: Mr Cameron is on the penitent stool here for his style, not for his substance. He's 'sorry' he was rude. Not sorry for his ruthless crushing of an important hope.

Mr Cameron added: 'But we tried for two elections to win the argument on grammar school selection, and we failed. I don't want to waste time on an argument we're not going to win. We have to move on, and we're going to have really great schools for all kids.’

PH comments: Really? I don't remember the Tories ever, ever trying to make the case for selection at an election or at any other time. They were divided over it even in the 1960s, when Sir Edward Boyle, their Education Minister, was keen on comprehensives. They massacred grammars under Ted Heath (whose Education Secretary was Margaret Thatcher) and - though John Major made vague noises about 'a grammar school in every town' - nothing ever came of them.

The Tories have never really tried to argue in a principled fashion in favour of academic selection, though they have, in a few local authorities, sometimes preserved it. The principled argument was left to people such as Eric James, High master of Manchester Grammar (then a direct-grant school open to bright children from poor homes, now a private school), later Lord James of Rusholme. In my view, it has now been decisively won, by the pro-grammar school side, thanks to the dreadful results of comprehensive education now visible all round us (see the education chapter in my book 'The Cameron Delusion' for full details).

But in general, as a party in power, the Tories helped to destroy academic selection and failed to revive it when they had the chance So what is he talking about here when he speaks of 'failing' and 'wasting time'? They never even tried. You can't win an argument you haven't the guts, or the inclination, to make. And when you 'lose' a fight you wouldn't have, don't then pretend that anyone's to blame but you, for failing to try.

As for 'we have to move on', I have seldom seen a more perfect example of New Labour Speak issue from Mr Cameron's mouth. What does this nasty expression mean? It means 'We have the power and you don't - so stop arguing and accept what you're given'. That's what it means.

Political Correctness

Then, in this important section, Mr Cameron seeks to excuse his drive for Political Correctness. Amanda writes: ‘I can't quite shake off the nagging sense of disappointment I felt in his early years as leader. All those photo opportunities with huskies on arctic glaciers and “hug-a-hoodie” pledges seemed to me a triumph of style over substance.

‘Cameron visibly bristles when I tell him as much. “I know it upset strong Conservatives like you, but I did what I thought was necessary, and that was to get the Conservative Party back into contention again.

“We weren't being listened to. We could have stood naked on the building tops and shouted, but no one was listening.

“Because the Conservative Party had got outdated, it became too narrow in its focus. It wasn't in touch with the society it wanted to govern and to change. It needed to be modernised, and that meant a lot of things that were unpopular to some people.” ‘

Oddly enough, I'm with Mr Cameron there about how nobody was listening. But I concluded seven years ago that the Tory Party was a busted brand that wasn't worth saving, and that a new conservative grouping would have to shake off the legacy of the Thatcher years, which meant a new organisation able to appeal to ex-Labour-voting social conservatives, sick of crime, mass immigration and bad schools, which would have a different name and different origins.

Mr Cameron again: ‘This was not selling out Conservative principles, it was just updating and modernising our message for the modern world. We were hopelessly under-representing women. We were saying to people who were gay and to people from lots of different backgrounds and faiths that they weren't welcome.”

PH comments: This is a deliberate blurring of an important question, on which Mr Cameron has radically changed the policies of the Tory Party, mainly to win the favour of the BBC. If Conservative principles are Burkeian ones, based upon a genuinely conservative and Christian attitude towards social questions then it was certainly a betrayal of them. Though there is an argument that the Tories never had any principles anyway.

But what Mr Cameron calls 'updating and modernising' is in fact a deep and significant change of position, which - as usual, has gone unnoticed by most political journalists. There's a book to be written on the curious use of the word 'modernising' in politics. It's intended to convey the impression of non-political repair and renovation, when actually meaning a full-scale adoption of PC fundamentalism.

Take Theresa May, who once said (as most Conservative women politicians would also have said ): ‘I’m totally opposed to Labour’s idea of all-women shortlists and I think they are an insult to women. I’ve competed equally with men in my career, and I have been happy to do so in politics too.’ Then, a few months ago, Mrs May (to a total absence of hoots of derision from a vigilant media, apart from me) declared in a friendly interview with 'The Guardian' (of course) that she now favours all-women shortlists. The Guardian, perhaps unaware of her past position, did not bother to ask how she had undergone such a total change of mind.

I might also remind readers of Mrs May's response last year to Harriet Harman's latest wild anti-male schemes for 'equality'. Mrs May, Harriet's supposed Tory opponent, said: ‘I look forward to working constructively with them [the government] on ensuring that we have workable and practical legislation to provide for a fair society.’

Ms Harman thanked her for her ‘broad welcome for the package’.

Tories like to go on about how awful they think Mrs Harman is. But under David Cameron they snigger at Harriet Harman while simultaneously embracing Harriet Harman's beliefs - that 'equality' between men and women, who are fundamentally different - especially in the ability to bear children - can be enforced by legislation. This is a legitimate point of view worthy of debate, and with much support in the media and elsewhere. But it is not a settled truth. And it is not a conservative point of view. Conservatives might be expected to see the virtues in full-time motherhood, a 'career choice' wholly derided by modern politics.

Homosexuals were always perfectly welcome in the Tory Party, which contained a large number of homosexual individuals in significant positions. But the revolutionary leftist *idea* that homosexual relationships were equivalent to heterosexual marriage was not welcome. Mr Cameron (this is typical of PC apologists) deliberately blurs the issue of personal kindness, generosity and tolerance with the wholly different idea that, to be kind, generous and tolerant one must accept a radical political agenda of sexual revolution.

Mr Cameron then argues: 'And to change an organisation, you have to give it quite a shake. But if you look at the programme I've outlined, it's based on very serious Conservative values - the family, enterprise, belief in the importance of our nation, the importance of community.’

I think these commitments are so vague that they could just as easily be uttered by Gordon Brown or Nicholas Clegg, and probably have been. The difficulties arise when you begin to argue about what a family is, how much freedom you're prepared to give enterprise, from regulation and tax, at what point a nation gives up so much sovereignty that it ceases to be one – and as for 'community', it must be a finalist in the Olympic contest for most meaningless word ever uttered.

I've dealt elsewhere with the empty, gimmicky nature of Mr Cameron's supposed commitment to marriage, and won't repeat that point.

Amanda also wins another concession from Mr Cameron: ‘I tell him that his comment at a private dinner in 2005 that he was the natural “heir to Blair” felt like a smack in the face to those who could see the corrosive influence Blair had had on Britain. Cameron winces. “If I used that phrase, I regret that. The point I was trying to make was this: that if you are going to succeed in changing your country for the better, you have to know where it's come from.” ’

I'll bet he regrets it (and by the way, as Amanda and I and all Fleet Street well know, he most certainly did say it). It has cost him quite dear. But the point is (and his justification shows this) he does not regret copying the Blair rulebook in seeking to take over and refashion his party - though for a very different purpose.

Blair wanted to make Labour into the Liberal Democrats because old-style Labour socialism was finished. Mr Cameron wanted to make the Tories over into the Liberal Democrats because old-style conservatism *wasn't* finished, and was in danger of developing into a serious political force, and he wanted to ensure that didn't happen (see my book 'The Cameron Delusion', especially the section on the fall of Iain Duncan Smith).

So I shan't be joining Amanda in voting for Mr Cameron's party. And if I can persuade her to change her mind in the next few hours, I will.