The Prime Minister displays a remarkable inability to tell good advice from bad.
For some reason best known to himself, Matthew d’Ancona in yesterday’s Telegraph told us this was the moment when Cameron would emerge as a ‘Tribune of the People’. The PM would, d’Ancona insisted, give the Spring Tory Conference a full blast of his ‘gut belief’.
I’m not particularly interested in the contents of Cameron’s gut – it’s his head and heart I’m more concerned about. There doesn’t seem to be much inside the first, and one wonders if the latter organ is present at all.
I applauded Cameron’s swift action to leave beaten Labour out of government, I admired Hague’s negotiating skills in getting the LibDems on board, and I was grateful for the sensible, patient hours put into a hugely complex task by Oliver Letwin.
But before that scrambling about became a necessity, throughout the May 2010 Election campaign, Cameron ignored his grass roots, cold-shouldered the tough advice of Osborne & Clarke, tried to be all things to everyone, and….well, generally bodged the whole thing up. More than any other person in Government right now, he is in a mess entirely of his own making.
People fancy that David Cameron has excellent antennae – and indeed he does: for what the majority wants. For him, following majorities is the way to ensure that those against him, as it were, are likely to be outvoted.
But there are two flaws in his Weltanschauung. The first is that he only looks for majorities among the franchises that interest him. And the second is that he has no instinct at all for when the majority is talking bollocks. These are fatal failings, and they will do for him before too long.
Janet Daley wrote an interesting piece this morning asking ‘Do you feel that the Government is on your side?’ I’m reliably informed by those close to the Man Himself that Cammers really does think he’s seen as acting for everyone. But let’s examine whose side Dave has been on since his elevation to the Tory leadership:
1. People want to send their kids to better schools: Cameron dropped the Grammar School pledge. As a result, the admirable Malcolm Brady resigned. He now runs the 1922 Committee.
2. People are worried about growing levels of surveillance and erosions of liberty. David Davies resigned and refought his seat on principle. Davis won comfortably, but Cameron allowed the waters to close over him. Davies is now a beacon of Opposition.
3. People want justice, and an end to the Westminster gravy train: Cameron is offering MPs the chance to drop the new expenses regime.
4. People want lower taxes and a level playing field: Cameron let the bankers off, but their wrongdoings mean we’re all going to pay more tax for fewer services. His spineless rollover act on bonuses damaged him immensely.
5. Over half the electorate want to secede from the EU: Cameron doesn’t even have the issue on his radar. Now UKIP’s vote has soared again. (Without UKIP’s vote, he would’ve cruised home last May).
6. 87% of Brits want an end to all immigration now: Cameron has bottled out of a total ban, the arguments against which are risible. If we ‘don’t have the trained people’, then how is it going to cost more to train them than to import another half million expensive citizens?
7. Huge numbers of thinking people and 75% of the media business think Murdoch has too much power: Cameron has actively connived to give him even more. People are both suspicious of, disgusted by, Jeremy Hunt’s BSkyB decision.
Respectively, these acts show David Cameron as on the side of public schoolboys, controlling State police, the Tory Party, greedy legislators, arrogantly irresponsible bankers, Eurocrats, Left-leaning civil servants, and media moguls.
In short, people he meets. Who, on the whole, tend to be people like him. And for whom he expresses the majority opinion.
But these people are hopelessly out of touch, excruciatingly complacent, and – more importantly – plain wrong. The banks will not sort themselves out, the EU is a swollen corpse, FPTP voting is indefensible, MPs do need to get real, Britain is massively overcrowded, and (if Barnsley is anything to go by) two thirds of voters don’t like any of the Parties on offer.
More pressing now are two things hovering just above the horizon. The first is the Hackgate Scandal – and no, it isn’t going to go away, and yes, it does involve a huge police cover-up leading all the way up to elective Office. And the second is another financial crisis – so likely now that even Mervyn King has broken ranks to say Crash2 is on its way.
This is what I mean by an inability to tell wisdom from hubris. Aides confidently told him Coulson could tough out Hackgate – he didn’t. City sources told him the banks would regulate themselves – they haven’t. Osborne told him they’d cut a deal to end banker bashing – they haven’t. Steve Hilton told him softly-softly safety was the way to clinch the Election – it wasn’t. The FCO told him Erdogun was sound – he isn’t.
After the Bay of Pigs in 1961, Jack Kennedy never listened to another General for the remainder of his sadly truncated life. “They’re assholes, every last one” he told Gore Vidal, “And more important, always, always wrong”. Two days before his assassination, JFK told Pierre Salinger that “those Generals in Vietnam, none of them understands that the one thing we need to get is out”. Kennedy disliked Lyndon Johnson, but he only ever listened to LBJ’s view on whether a Bill could get through Congress.
This truly was the sagesse of the now overly-maligned Kennedy: he could tell shit from putty, and he didn’t confuse the message with the messenger.
David Cameron doesn’t have this. He doesn’t have a common touch at all in reality, and he doesn’t understand the aspirations of ordinary people, because he has never had to aim at those heights: he was born there.
He is listening to the wrong majorities, and it will be his downfall sooner rather than later.
The Slog 