Thursday, 27 October 2011
Regular readers here will know that I often scornfully refer to Tory MPs as ‘Black Labradors’, those hopelessly loyal dogs who endure all things from their masters and then, tails thumping and eyes shining with love and joy, are crammed into the station wagon for their final journey to the vet.
Well, I suppose you could say that on Tuesday night we saw the revolt of the Black Labradors.
But it was all the wrong way round. There they were, nearly 80 Tory MPs, all representing the views of their constituents as they are supposed to do, and they let themselves be defined as ‘rebels’.
It was they who were threatened with punishment and the ruin of their careers (should MPs have ‘careers’? I do not think so. The whole idea is all wrong ) .
The man doing the threatening was an individual elected to the leadership of his party on false pretences, on subtly spread untruths about his true feelings which enabled so many Tories, members, MPs and voters, to harbour ludicrous delusions about his true beliefs.
And he had then become Prime Minister thanks to a similar subtle hint, never made explicit, but spread through the media by willing toadies, that he was ‘sound’ on the issues that really concern conservative British people.
By contrast, the 79 ‘rebels’ were merely doing what they had said they would do and what they were elected to do, and, in a way, what they are paid to do.
It is Mr Cameron whose ‘career’ should be threatened. It is Mr Cameron who should be facing ‘discipline’ for behaviour which, even according to his loose Public School code, is fundamentally shameful – namely pledging to be one sort of Prime Minister to gain office, and then being another sort when he got there.
Now, I’m not very sympathetic to those who were fooled by this. It was plain to me that Mr Cameron was always what he now is, and I used a lot of effort, patience and time in explaining this to wilfully deaf Tories before 2010.
(By the way, I much enjoyed myself on Tuesday evening at a meeting of the Bruges Group in London, where I was able to say repeatedly that I had told them so, in October 2009, and they had then welcomed me with a response so chilly it made me believe in man-made global cooling. Last night was different. My calls for the death of the Tory Party were met with warm applause. Meanwhile, the rather absurd David Campbell-Bannerman, who has incomprehensibly returned to the Tories from UKIP, while still claiming to be pro-independence, at the precise moment when the Tory Party has rededicated itself at the altar of Brussels, must have found the whole occasion a sore trial. Too bad.)
And now I say to these ‘rebels’, that their ‘revolt’ on Tuesday night will be worthless if they do not now move rapidly towards leaving the party which dares to punish them for following their principles and representing those who sent them to Westminster. If this breach is not the occasion for such a split, then they are indeed Black Labradors. A brief spell of whimpering, even an uncharacteristic nip at their master’s silk-socked ankles, does not fundamentally alter a relationship in which the good are servile, and the bad are triumphant.
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