Memex 1.1

Good God! Janet Daley thinks Gordon Brown is rather good.

In a time of national threat we don’t want cuddly; we want serious and stern. Charm might be nice when politics is becalmed and day-to-day living is secure, but gravitas is a whole lot better when there are unknown numbers of people in your midst ready to commit random mass murder. When a nation is in danger, it judges its leader (or potential leader) by his character, rather than his personality. So if the contest between Mr Brown’s governing style and David Cameron’s opposition is really to be, as my colleague Boris Johnson wrote on this page last week, between humourless Labour Roundheads and jolly Tory Cavaliers, then God pity the Conservatives. The last thing that the electorate will welcome now is the opportunity to be governed by prancing fops.

Nice piece by Michael Portillo.

I had concluded, when I left politics, that the Tories were ungovernable and had a death wish. But Cameron is clever and charismatic; I believed he could succeed where I had failed, especially since even the Conservatives might learn something after three landslide defeats.

Now I am not so sure. Cameron has wobbled. Unless he regains control of his party at once, the project will be lost. It would be much better for him to press on even at the risk of being deposed than to settle into the leadership agony of Hague and Howard.

I have always doubted that the Conservatives could win the next election. Now the question in my mind is different: can the Tories ever win again?

I enjoyed Toff At The Top — Peter Hitchens’s Dispatches documentary about Dave ‘Vote Blue to Get Green’ Cameron. I don’t much care for Hitchens, but this time I suspect he was on the money. His basic argument was that Cameron is a shameless opportunist who doesn’t believe in anything, and certainly doesn’t believe in the Conservative values that Hitchens worships.

One interesting snippet from the film came when Hitch was retracing Cameron’s days as an undergraduate at Oxford, where he was a member of the Bullingdon Club, a rowdy upper-class dining club famous for the sound of breaking glass and immortalised as the Bollinger Club in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. The Bullingdons dress up in Regency evening wear and Hitchens had the brilliant idea of going to Ede and Ravenscroft, the expensive Savile Row tailor which maintains an establishment in Oxford (and indeed in Cambridge also) to cater for the sartorial needs of wealthy toffs like Cameron. He inspected the Bullingdon uniform and inquired about its cost. About £3,000.

Another interesting snippet. There’s an Oxford photography firm which regularly takes photographs of the Young Bullingdons in their finery. They have a particularly fine picture of young Cameron togged out for a night’s drinking and trashing. But it turns out that the firm has withdrawn the publication rights to all its Bullingdon pics of Cameron’s era — so that they are no longer published anywhere. Can’t even find them on Google Images. I wonder how much the Tories paid for that particular favour.

Hitchens also maintained that Cameron has thirteen Old Etonians in his Shadow Cabinet. Wow! Can this be true? Talk about a vast system of out-relief for the upper classes. It’s almost enough to make one look fondly on Gordon Brown. I said almost.

Update… David Mackinder found the key photograph — it was published by the Daily Telegraph with a helpful index to the main poseurs. Nice caption too: “Cameron as leader of the Slightly Silly Party”.

The Conservative party is no longer riven with ideological division in the public way it once was, but the “mods” and “rockers” are still there, tooled up and ready to rumble. Indeed some suspect that the peace exists precisely because Cameron has steered clear of making tough ideological pronouncements.

Amassed to the right of him there are those who have never forgiven the party for dumping Margaret Thatcher — a group that one moderniser calls “the head-banging Europhobic tax-cutters”. They want to see a flash of the old, a firm commitment to reducing taxes and an end to the “namby-pamby” politics of equal rights and work-life balance.

On the other side are the “über-Cameroons”, metropolitan-based modernisers who want their leader to go further in burying his party’s unpopular past and set out a more principled compassionate agenda. They value social workers above tax cuts and cheered Cameron’s recent apology to Nelson Mandela on behalf of the party for having once branded him a terrorist.

In short, there is a turf war going on for the soul of the Tory party and Cameron is caught in the middle of it. Until now he has made good mood music and given neither side anything substantial to get angry about. Now he is being asked to produce the beef.

[Source]

Insightful column by Andrew Sullivan on Dave Cameron’s new friend — and conference speaker — John McCain.

Last weekend turned into a pivotal moment in his [McCain’s] career. For the past four years he has fought the Bush administration’s attempt to authorise interrogative abuse of military detainees. As a victim of torture himself McCain’s credentials for this fight were enormous. And, to his credit, his legislative efforts have indeed put a stop to the widespread abuse that has occurred in the regular military since the winter of 2001.

But he wants to win the Republican nomination; and Karl Rove, Bush’s political guru, has decided that the only way to rescue the mid-term elections is to run on who can be tough enough on terror suspects. If McCain had refused to compromise over torture he would have essentially been destroying the Republican game plan for retaining Congress. So Bush called him out.

The deal they struck was simple: Bush wouldn’t formally renege on Geneva and wouldn’t formally authorise waterboarding, hypothermia and other horrors.

But he was given legislative leeway to decide what to do with terror suspects (including waterboarding and hypothermia) and had authority to train an elite squad of CIA “coercive interrogators” for the purpose. His civilian officials would also be given complete legal impunity for possible war crimes committed in the past.

What did McCain get in return? Some cynics in Washington say the answer is simple: the nomination. And McCain has been doing his best to recruit many Bush loyalists. Did McCain sell his soul for power? That’s what his sharpest critics would say.

[…]

The Tories will cheer him this week. He is certainly much more congenial to the party of David Cameron than Bush, Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld. But McCain is also a symbol, along with Bill Clinton, of how power is never without its costs. One day Cameron may have the opportunity to share their pain.

Ye Gods! And there’s poor ol’ Gordon Brown thinking he’s hip because he’s got an iPod. Not only does Dave ‘Vote Blue to get Green’ Cameron have a wind turbine and solar panels but how he has a video Blog. It’s called Webcameron, naturally. I’ve just watched his first post — shot in his kitchen with kids shouting and scenes of general domestic chaos. The man’s a genius — at PR.

Later… The semiotics of the first video post are interesting. For example:

Who indeed?

Terrific column by Martin Kettle.

Yesterday’s Guardian poll shot an arrow through the heart of the Labour party. It says that Labour is on course to lose the next election. It says that Gordon Brown hasn’t got what it takes to turn things around. It implies that no one else in the Labour party has, either. It crystallises everything anxious Labour activists have been saying to themselves on the eve of the party conference in Manchester - and then it adds some. It is hard to think of a more pivotal political opinion poll in recent times…

It’s a very perceptive piece — and I’m not saying that just because Kettle agrees with me. Here’s how it concludes:

Perceived likability unlocks electability. One of the reasons Blair dominated British politics for so long was that, where personality was concerned, he had it. It is equally clear that one of Cameron’s great strengths is that he has it too. The message of the poll is that the voters have sized Brown up and don’t like what they see. It may be miserably demeaning that modern politics has come to this. But if Brown hasn’t got it, how does he acquire it? And if he can’t acquire it, who else has Labour got?

Answer: nobody.

Way back last December I did some musing about why Gordon Brown would be a liability as Labour leader. I wrote:

Boredom is the elephant in the room of British politics. The electorate is, in the main, entirely uninterested in politics. It complains about the government, of course, but in the main it is hard to stir up electors on ideological or policy grounds. They put up with the Tories, for example, for 18 years, and eventually threw them out not because the party was intellectually and morally bankrupt (as we pointy-headed intellectuals fondly imagine), but basically because people had become tired of seeing all those old faces trotting out the same old story.

Now spool forward four years to 2009. In the Labour corner will be dull, monotonic, dark-suited, Homburg-hatted Brown rabbitting on about the timing of the economic cycle, the importance of means-tested benefits and how he was right about pensions all along. Yawn, zzzzz…. For the Tories, there will be a young, smooth-talking snake-oil salesman named Cameron. Could this be the nightmare scenario that Blair foresees, and is determined to avoid?

Now comes this report of a survey commissioned by the Guardian in advance of next week’s Labour party Conference.

The scale of the challenge facing Gordon Brown as Labour’s likely next leader is revealed today by a Guardian/ICM poll showing that voters believe David Cameron would make a more effective prime minister and that Britain will be better off if Labour loses the next election.

As activists prepare to head to Manchester for the party’s annual conference, beginning on Sunday, the poll suggests voters may be tired of Labour: 70% said they agreed with the phrase it was “time for change”, if there were a general election tomorrow, and only 23% agreed with the phrase “continuity is important, stick with Labour”.

And while we’re on the subject of class, there’s an interesting piece in the Guardian on the fact that no fewer than 15 members of Dave ‘Vote Blue to get Green’ Cameron’s Shadow Cabinet are old Etonians.