Dave the dilettante: A damning verdict on the shallowness of the PM by Britain's leading political analyst
Wednesday, 11 April 2012
The hollow men of British politics
Not only has Don Porter and Melanie Phillips given the Conservative elite a wake up call but so has Anthony King as below:-
If this doesn't get through to Oliver Letwin and Francis Maude, following on the heels of Gorgeous George's Bradford switch across the buttocks to all three mainstream parties, then we still have the EP elections in May of 2014.
For a start Cameron must remove Clarke and Heseltine from positions of influence and seek advisors other than Letwin and Fraude. Will he do it though?
By ANTHONY KING
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Prime Minister David Cameron: Lacking in professionalism?
A leader’s judgment needs to be, among other things, strictly professional. No one doubts that Nazi general Erwin Rommel was fighting in a vile cause, but everyone agrees that he was a gifted soldier, one of his generation’s most brilliant generals. He was a consummate professional.
Professionalism defined Margaret Thatcher, too. Some adored her, others reviled her. But few denied that — agree with her or disagree with her — she was very good at her job.
She knew where she wanted to go, and she made sure that members of her Cabinet helped her to get there. Otherwise they were sidelined or sacked.
Britain’s present Prime Minister, David Cameron, is a thoroughly decent man and aspires to do well by his country as well as his family.
Questions have necessarily arisen about his policies, but alarmingly they have also begun to arise — as well they should — about his professional competence. Is he really a top-class professional as Prime Minister? The truth is that there have to be doubts.
A recent comedy of errors has revealed weaknesses in Mr Cameron’s premiership that should have been evident for months.
With his ever-jutting jaw, the Prime Minister projects himself as a toughie, albeit a smooth-talking one — but in reality he is emerging as Britain’s first dilettante Prime Minister since Herbert Asquith.
The dictionary defines ‘dilettante’ as a person who has a superficial interest in a subject but lacks real knowledge of it. Mr Cameron fits that description — a man comfortable with everything, but not really on top of anything. There has been no Prime Minister quite like him for nearly a century.
The Government he heads is meant to be concentrating all its efforts on one great task: reducing Britain’s fiscal deficit and bringing the public finances under control. But it seems to want to do everything.
Love her or hate her: Thatcher knew where she wanted to go, and she made sure that members of her Cabinet helped her to get there
The sheer scale of its reform programme is mind-boggling, encompassing everything from teaching children to read using the phonics system (a programme unlikely to reduce the deficit), to enabling local voters to elect their own police commissioner (about which ditto).
Moreover, these innumerable reforms, however admirable they might be in themselves, are being introduced at great speed, as though they are not only important — which is arguable — but also desperately urgent, as though the gates of the temple would be rent asunder if they were not in place by next weekend.
Great Prime Ministers, not least Margaret Thatcher, have made haste slowly, almost at a snail’s pace. Of course, Mrs Thatcher had her grands projets (as the French say), but they had to wait until she was sure they could be built on solid foundations. Radical trade union reform was undertaken only towards the end of her first term, large-scale privatisation only at the beginning of her second.
Mrs Thatcher — and Tony Blair, for that matter — took charge of their ministers, not in the sense of controlling their every movement, but in the sense of making sure their policies and initiatives were consistent with their government’s overall objectives.
David Cameron, by contrast, seems to run a kind of franchise operation, with each departmental outlet allowed to be effectively self-governing.
Mysterious: How did the PM not notice the odd professional relationship that existed between Liam Fox and Adam Adam Werritty?
For example, Education Secretary Michael Gove does his thing. Local Government chief Eric Pickles does his. Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke, up to a point, does his. And, of course, Health Secretary Andrew Lansley does his — or, at least, was allowed to until he was stopped.
But it is a comment on Mr Cameron’s Prime Ministerial style that Mr Lansley was allowed to introduce radical NHS reforms without No 10 being fully apprised of them.
Further, that he was allowed to proceed so far before the Prime Minister apparently noticed that anything untoward was happening — and that the Act that has now reached the statute book is, by common consent, a thing of shreds and patches.
David Cameron gives the impression of lacking both a feel for the big picture and, simultaneously, an eye for detail. It remains a mystery how he appointed Peter Cruddas as Tory Co-treasurer, and then failed to notice what his ill-chosen appointee was up to (when a Sunday paper clearly had noticed and then sent an undercover reporter to meet him posing as a wealthy party donor).
But it’s not the first time the party has been troubled in that department.
Mr Cameron’s initial appointment as Treasurer, the multi-millionaire and former tax exile David Rowland, was forced to resign because of his controversial practices before he even started the job.
It also remains a mystery how he failed to notice that Liam Fox, his then Defence Secretary, not only had a rather strange close friend in his adviser Adam Werritty, but was actually travelling around the world with him.
No Prime Minister is — or should try to be — a chief executive. Government is too big a business for that. The few PMs who have tried to keep on top of everything, notably Sir Anthony Eden in the Fifties, have come unstuck.
But Prime Ministers do need to have an executive disposition: a desire to be in charge overall, if not in charge of every little detail and not just a spokesman.
That means, among other things, working hard. Only those who see Mr Cameron daily can really know how hard he works and how deeply he digs into big and complicated issues, but he certainly gives the impression of being less a policy wonk than someone who travels policy-lite — a man who scans the papers that officials put in front of him instead of devouring them.
His background before entering Parliament was in political research and public relations — the longest job he ever held was as head of corporate affairs in a media conglomerate — and his conception of his own role as Prime Minister seems to owe much to that history.
He seems to have cast himself not as his Government’s boss, but as its frontman and sales manager — someone more concerned about how his Government looks than about its capacity to deliver.
A recent comedy of errors has revealed weaknesses in Mr Cameron's premiership that should have been evident for months
Old-fashioned American Republicans used to say of someone they disliked ‘he’s never met a payroll’, in other words that the individual in question had never borne ultimate responsibility and seemed to care more about what he said than what he did.
Mr Cameron, literally, has never met a payroll. Figuratively, he has so far not met one, either.
David Cameron’s greatest pleasure evidently lies in making speeches. He makes an extraordinarily large number of them, on everything from private investment in Britain’s roads to research funding for dementia, with the Big Society and the future of the UK in between and the environment shortly to come. In comparison, Tony Blair was positively tongue-tied.
Mr Cameron also enjoys foreign travel. Yesterday he combined his two loves with a speech to Nissan car workers in Japan. On Friday, he arrives in Burma where he might find another public speaking opportunity.
There was a time, not so long ago, when Prime Ministerial speeches were big events. Premiers mostly spoke only when they had important things to say. Not any longer.
Prime Ministers also used to steer clear of electioneering, except during general election campaigns.
A generation ago, Harold Macmillan was thought to have demeaned himself by speaking in a Parliamentary by-election campaign. Last week, David Cameron took time off other business to launch the Conservatives’ local election campaign in Wales.
Cameron loves to travel: The PM has combined his two loves with a speech to Nissan car workers during his trip to Japan
The trouble with having a Premier as hands-off as Mr Cameron appears to be is that it leaves the Government lacking both coherence and a sense of direction. No deputy can provide that. No other member of the Cabinet can, either. Not even the Chancellor.
And left to their own devices, ministers will inevitably plough their own furrows and champion their own causes.
That is what is happening at the moment. The present administration looks more like a school playground than an orderly classroom. It gives the impression of being hollow at the centre — and it probably is.
David Cameron is frequently accused of being out of touch with the British people. But a different charge, equally serious, can also now be levelled against him: that he is out of touch with his own Government.
B, thank you for circulating this article.
Unquestionably one of the best summaries of the failure of the current leadership of
the Conservative Party - or rather lack of it - and the alienation of real grass roots
Conservative voters. How do we get this through to Cameron and his team...or is
it already too late ?
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxPK
A poll of voters in the south London borough of Bromley, taken by the Times (£) to gauge support for Labour's Ken Livingstone and the Conservatives' Boris Johnson in the London Mayoral contest, is fascinating - not just for what those polled were saying about the two candidates but also about the Tory Prime Minister, David Cameron:
'"All the time things were going quite well, Mr Cameron seemed quite impressive," Graham said. "But as soon as they don't, he doesn't come across so well...When things go wrong he doesn't seem to know what to do. He pretends he's a man of the people but he's not."
'"We need a strong leader, another Margaret Thatcher. At least she had the courage of her convictions. She's like Boris Johnson, but in a different way. In a dress," Gary said.'
This chimes with the opinion expressed in the Telegraph by Don Porter, former chairman of the National Conservative Convention and deputy chairman of the Conservative Party Board, who writes that the party has lost sight of its true values and disconnected itself from its grass-roots through a 'loss of clarity, principle and policy direction'.
Such opinions will undoubtedly be causing concern to the Tory leadership -- but on past form, are unlikely to lead them to draw the right conclusion.This is that their entire strategy of decontaminating the brand to regain power was totally misconceived.
As I have been writing consistently since this strategy was first developed when the Tories under Cameron were in opposition, it was based on a fundamental misreading of why they had lost the previous three general elections, and a corresponding misreading of why Tony Blair had won them.
They thought Blair had kept winning because he had surfed the zeitgeist of lifestyle change, that he wore his emotions on his sleeve, that he was young and hip and relaxed, and that he stood for compassion and caring and a softer, kinder, gentler, more inclusive world. They thought the Tories lost because they were none of those things; that they were old and reactionary and, well, conservative; that they were seen to stand for wealth and privilege; that they seemed heartless and cruel and anally retentive and just plain weird.
The lesson of their loss of power was that Britain had changed and moved socially to the left - and so the Tories also had to move to the left. Hence the whole strategy of hugging hoodies and huskies, embracing the green agenda and gay rights and dying in the last ditch to preserve the National Health Service and overseas aid budget while screwing the armed forces and the police.
This, the Tory modernisers lectured the party, was the only way it would ever win power again. The result? It failed to win the last electionwhich was thought to be unlosable against what was then arguably the most catastrophic and unpopular government in living memory.
And so were the modernisers abashed and humbled by this failure? Not a bit of it. The reason they hadn't won, they told each other and their sycophants in the media, was that they had not been left-wing enough.
They had thus failed to grasp two vital points. The first was that voters had not turned away from the Tories because they weren't green or gay enough or didn't wear blue jeans and say 'Hey, man!' and strum a Fender Stratocaster electric guitar. Voters recoiled from the Tories because they had become a national joke and as such were clearly simply unelectable. They had proved themselves to be utterly incompetent, inept and untrustworthy. And trust -- the character issue -- is the single most important factor behind the choice a voter makes.
Second, the most important point about Blair was that, although he was indeed a latter-day Jacobin in his revolutionary goal of transforming Britain, the world and human nature itself, the pitch by which he had won power was actually to social conservatism with his pledge to make Britain safe again from young hoodlums and to repair the deep social wounds that were driving people apart and destroying the nation's sense of community and identity.
In short, he won power by appearing to be conservative. Utterly failing to grasp this essential fact, the Conservative leadership decided instead to ditch conservatism for boiler-plate, politically-correct leftism -- which so many voters loathed, despised and feared.
The Cameroons have still not learned their lesson. They throw a few bones such as welfare and education reform to their core constituency to try to keep them on side -- while refusing to see how profoundly all the pc ideology is turning such core voters off.
They refuse to see this because they just don't care about this constituency, for whom their disdain and contempt are all too visible.What they care about instead is de-fanging the BBC in order to prevent it from attacking them; and that means propitiating the BBC's gods at the Guardian.
Even now that the serial incompetence of the past few weeks -- over the Budget, pasties and party donor debacles -- has turned some of their erstwhile media supporters against them, they still don't get it. Their fundamental strategic error of repositioning is still falsely reflected back at them as the 'centre ground' by the BBC, the Guardian and the Times (which latter paper, as a result, is now in serious danger of finding itself dangerously detached both from its proprietor, who has turned savagely on Cameron -- maybe for other reasons too -- and from the general public, which is able to detect shallowness and falsity in its political leaders at a thousand paces).
This message that a reader has sent me seems to sum this up pretty well:
'It's now time to call a halt. I think we've all put up with this nonsense quite long enough.
'We voted for change. We voted to rid our country of socialism, of compromise, of personal power and individuals' self interest in the benefits of power. We voted to protect our hard won standards, our culture and traditions and our pride in our unique nationhood. We voted to rid ourselves of the stench of carpet-bagging Blair and Anglophobe, gravy-train riding, self-serving Brown.
'We did not vote for more of the same with a different coat. In particular we did not vote for a Lib Dem-led coalition. We did not rush to join a group of inconsequential political nonentities.
'We did not wish upon our impoverished , culturally endangered nation more of the same ; more creeping socialism , more invasive corrosive multicultural zealotry, more dependence on and ever closer sovereign integration with the Eurolosers , an absurd devotion to outrageous Green and overseas aid nonsense and even more of the self-serving economic illiteracy characterised by Clegg and his crew.
'We tied what remained of our severely damaged hopes wishes and aspirations to the colours of a "new revitalised" Party led by a professed Conservative, a man purporting to have presence on the world stage, a man supposedly of unwavering principle and courage, a protector of our country, our culture and our establishment. Perhaps, we foolishly thought, with this man we will get our country back.
'Wrong on every count!
'The well-worn excuse that no party won a clear majority last time will no longer wash. What we see is a party and leadership that lacks any understanding of our priorities and the will and courage to implement them. It simply lacks the spine to win on its own account, and we must suffer the indignity of seeing our vote wasted while obeisance is paid to the insignificant Clegg and his losers.
'As I said, enough. Like many, many others I am not a "captive vote", as John Major would testify. The continued presence of the hapless Maude, Letwin and Heseltine should be a constant reminder of what ineptitude and failure look like.
'The Abstention Party is back in business.'
It's all about character; and character means principle, consistency and courage. The Cameroons don't seem to know what any of these even mean.
That's why the Tories are in such trouble. The Cameroon modernisers are the hollow men, who 'like deceitful jades sink in the trial'.
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