Donald Macintyre's Sketch: Theresa May misses the memo on 'sunshine all the way!'
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Your support makes all the difference.Introducing David Cameron yesterday Theresa May set out her own stall in case it all goes wrong with a bid for one of the more bizarre Guinness Book of Records entries, up there with the most people throwing flip-flops simultaneously and the fastest 100 metre sprint on all fours. “I have excluded more hate preachers than any other Home Secretary,” she announced.
Unfortunately, by emphasising the dark side, she demonstrated that she had not been copied in on the new, relentlessly positive, campaign theme: sunshine all the way! The PM mentioned the “good life” imminent in the post May-7 Tory Arcadia a dizzying nine times— ensuring that the core over 50s demographic who might have seen the 1970s Felicity Kendal/Penelope Keith vehicle got the point.
Out went the Lynton Crosby-esque if it’s not hurting it’s not working, cuts r us, Miliband is useless approach (He didn’t mention the newly re-energised babe-magnet Labour leader once in his set speech ). In came the sub-Reaganesque: “This buccaneering, world beating, can-do country—we can do it all over again.” True he deployed the Crosby line of completing the job (ie of slashing the deficit, not to mention the state.) But even this he softened by reprising his party conference rhyme-crazed rap: “let’s not go back to square one/let’s finish what we have begun.”
He left the stage, Clinton-like, to Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop (thinking about tomorrow).” But yesterday he unleashed the bribes as if there wasn’t one: slashing inheritance tax (violating Lloyd George's maxim that it’s best to tax people when they’re dead.) De-taxing minimum wage earners among £7.2 billion unfunded tax cuts. Multi-billion pound right to buy for housing association tenants. Cameron’s right that there’s a big difference between Labour and the Tories: Labour would never get away with it.
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