SIMON HEFFER SAYS WHAT HE REALLY THINKS ABOUT DAVE

Cynical Highlander pointed out this article and indeed linked to it in another post on here, but I think it is worth a post in itself to ensure that it reaches a wider audience. I wrote last week about his appointment of two of his private staff to the Civil Service. I didn’t realise that, in fact that was the tip of the iceberg: It seems he has appointed no fewer than 26 people to the public payroll, on short-term contracts, without advertising their posts. Each one a vanity post.. and this is particularly galling given that he criticized the last government for all their special advisors and promised to do away with that kind of government..

In this comment piece Simon Heffer, in his own highly amusing style, has torn David Cameron to pieces for being as shallow as I have always thought him to be.

I feared when he was elected over David Davis that the Tories had made a huge mistake. Yes he was shiny; yes he was younger than Davies and despite his modernising tone he was more of what the Tories used to be before Heath, Thatcher and major (I nearly said and Blair!) lowered the tone, as it were. (David Davis is a working class Tory who had come up the hard way from an estate, raised, I seem to remember, by a single mum.)

But with Dave, it seemed to me that there was nothing underneath the gloss; the shiny exterior groomed by Eton and oxford for a place at someone’s top table.

But what, I wondered, did Dave stand for? Modernisation of course, but, what did that mean? In opposition it seemed to mean “hug and hoodie” and “call me Dave” (just like he was an ‘ordinary’ person. He even took his tie off sometimes.

But Dave hadn’t been passionate about politics all his life; he was no William Hague, deciding he wanted to be prime minister when he was 6 ... or thereby. At Oxford he eschewed political organisations and chose instead to play tennis for Brasenose and to join the Octagon and Bullingdon clubs, organizations for the well heeled. He appears not even to have been a member of the Oxford Union.

His only real job outside politics was as Director of Corporate Affairs (whatever that is, it’s at director level and seems to have involved PR and spin) for a tv company.

I’m not sure if anyone has much of a clue what motivates David Cameron, beyond his ambition.

One thing seems self evident. He lacks any kind of conviction; he has no founding principles underpinning his politics, and this lack of foundation is made up for by an overload of....yes that thing he so criticised in the appalling Labour governments of Blair and Brown: Spin.

The piece is relatively long, at some 1500 words, but it well worth a read. It seems to encapsulate what David Cameron is about... and I had wondered, as I’m sure you did... added to which it is extremely funny.