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.

SO IT'S GOODNIGHT FROM HIM..........AT LAST

Well. He’s gone. In my opinion one of the most awful prime ministers ever; on a par with Thatcher, and that's saying something!

I’m not happy I feel that way.

My politics fall to the left of centre. I don’t care much for the rich. Mind, they don’t need me to care about them; they are rather good at caring for themselves. I do care about people who for some reason or another are disadvantaged in the dog eat dog world that Thatcher encouraged and Blair and Brown, in their desperate bid to appeal to the middle classes of southern England, embraced with gusto.

I am at a loss to understand, given all that Brown and Blair did to this country’s poor and dispossessed, that all over Scotland in the deprived housing estates where people are living third world lives, they trotted out and voted for the party that dropped bricks on them from a great height. “Our party; the party of the working man”. Aye! When your granddad was a lad, maybe.

People say that Cameron doesn’t understand common people, and they are bang on right. Of course he doesn’t. He went to Eton and Oxford. He was a member of a dining club whose raison d’être was, possibly still is, to smash up restaurants and get daddy to pay the next day. His daddy clearly had enough money to do this, and didn’t mind parting with it.

What does Cameron know about council houses with rooms so small you can’t get more than four people in, or about paper thin walls so you can hear when the next door neighbour turns on a tap, used the toilet, plays a cd? What does he know of joblessness and being treated like dirt by the Jobcentre? What does he know about making a wage last all week, knowing that it won’t, and you’ll be hungry? What about being scared to go outside your door for fear of knife wielding thugs who need money for drugs?

Nothing.

Oh yes, he’s been on the estates. He’s taken his tie off; he’s met a few black kids. And Nadine Dorries doubtless told him what it was like to live in a tower block on the dole money, plus the £50 she had stuffed in her bra (thereby doubling it).

But what did Brown know of that life? He’s a middle class lad, who lived in the manse, went to uni, did a doctorate. That wasn’t ordinary working class in the ‘60s.

He certainly didn’t know much about it firsthand. And after all these years on an MP’s salary; all these years with Downing Street and Chequers to live in, with cars and planes to take him where he wanted to go... (I note he flew to the “family home” for one day over the weekend, with his family!! No second class trains for Oor Gordo!), he knew even less, which is why he was so ill equipped to cope with that woman who wondered where the Eastern Europeans were coming from and why they were taking all the jobs so there wouldn’t be any for her grandchildren. He hadn’t a clue what this “ordinary” rather dowdy working class woman who got her grammar wrong was. He’s not seen one for 20 years. He waves out of his car at them but he doesn’t look. Everyone he meets dresses from Saville Row; their suits cost more than a pensioner lives on for a year. And if they know about Eastern Europeans, it’s because they have them as live in staff!!

So Cameron won’t be any less in touch that Brown was, but he won’t be any more in touch either.

Heaven help us.



Pic: Gordon Brown after the bigot moment and Members of the Bullingdon (known as "Bullers" to those in the know) and including our esteemed prime minister.