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.

WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER ....GREAT!

Mr Cameron is going to lead a fight back against “vested interests” that say that their particular bit of the world should not suffer cutbacks. Good luck to him.... No, wait, bad luck to him. Why shouldn't people have vested interests? It's their job, their career, their kids' future, their lives.

He is particularly concerned that the police, who have warned of a ‘Christmas for Criminals’, should be put back in their box.

But surely the people who say that if you cut staff you will receive a worse service are not wrong, are they? I mean, it’s just an uncomfortable fact that, if you cut the policing budget, you are likely to have fewer police, working with inferior equipment, which in turn will mean that criminals will be the real winners.

Not long ago Annabel Goldie made it a condition of her support for the government’s budget that there be 1000 more police on the Scottish streets. She said, quite rightly, that the Conservatives had secured an important concession which would make life safer for Scots. What goes up, must come down..... QED.

People (the government tells us) are behind the coalition’s cuts, but no one wants to be a victim. I’ve heard pensioners agree that there must be cuts, but then decrying the possibility that concessionary travel passes or to winter fuel allowances be cut. I heard a woman yesterday deploring the possibility that care homes will have to close and residents sent home to their families. The woman has to work; she can’t have her elderly mother to stay. But she adds she’s very much for the cuts... just not cuts that will hurt her.

Simon Heffer, surely a government supporter, points out that whilst the RAF can be cut, there must be no cuts to the Army and Navy because, he says, the world is looking very dangerous. Well Simon, we’ll just have to take a back seat and not interfere with all the things that are looking so dangerous. It’s not like we are needed. America only wants us so that they don’t look as if they are on their own.

We are all in this together whether we are happy about it, or like me, unhappy. I’m not a banker and I don’t owe a halfpenny, not on one single credit card, not on a store card, not on a mortgage, so I consider this crisis to be not any of my doing. So, I’m in it together, without being in it at all. But undoubtedly my library will close, the parks nearby will not be planted with flowers, the grass will be cut less frequently, my bins will be emptied on fewer occasions, the ponds will cover with algae, the roads will not be repaired, and on the few occasions I want a policeman, I will have to do without. I'll have to wait longer in queues, and I'll get even more nonsense when I come into contact with public bodies. And that’s just the start.

C’est la vie.

That the poor will be affected more than the rich goes without saying. It’s unavoidable. A few inconveniences at the top will equate to lives made intolerable at the bottom.

But that’s what you get when you allow a stupid man full reign on the finances because you have a weak and vain prime minister who lacks the courage to challenge his chancellor. That’s what you get when that stupid chancellor wants to go down in history for having beaten boom and bust, as if that were possible, and then demands to be prime minister. That’s what you get when greedy bankers see a chance to do all the things that, if they know anything about economics at all, they know will implode one day. And that’s what you get when you replace these vain, stupid, irresponsible, glory seekers with a group of heartless incompetents who have never known what it was like not to have a couple of million in the bank.

Welcome to Britain. And you wonder why I want independence?