After five years of completely flaccid leadership, I'm glad something 'pumps up' David Cameron
It's just a shame that what excites him is meeting cupcake makers and app designers
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Your support makes all the difference.Jacket-less and waving his hands around more than normal, David Cameron did his best impression of a passionate man yesterday.
In a speech designed to show that Prime Minister was fiery and up for a fight, he took the opportunity to talk up older voters, praising firms like B&Q for valuing pensioners work ethic.
This was Cameron being fiery. At one point, tie loosened, arms spread, he spoke of being inspired by meeting entrepreneurs at Number 10 who have left their day jobs to “take a risk”.
“That pumps me up,” he exclaimed.
But does it really?
Meeting cupcake bakers and app designers who’ve left their jobs as stock brokers to pursue their dreams: is that really what gets him going?
The Tory leader has always had the look of someone doing his job because it seems like the best way to fill the day. Like a 21-year-old stockbroker whose daddy owns the firm, being PM is merely the culmination of a mindless career progression. Go to Eton, go to Oxford, assume the highest office in the land.
It was telling that yesterday’s speech, billed as passionate and defiant, was delivered to an audience of chartered accountants.
As he told the crowd how “pumped” up he was, few people back home were buying it. Not even 24 hours had passed since Tory donors had criticised Cameron for not showing enough passion on the campaign trail. Watching him shout his head off – to a room full of people who will tell you themselves that their job is among the most boring in the world – was about as inspirational as watching a CEO panic at his company's share price.
After 10 years as Tory leader it’s hard to know what gets Cameron going. In all the time he’s been in politics, he’s barely offered a political opinion. Having pledged to lead the "greenest government ever", he has since reportedly wished to get rid of all “green crap”. He also dismissed Ukip supporters as “swivel eyed loons”, but now seems determined to steal all their policies.
His single biggest ideological commitment on entering office, the Big Society, is barely mentioned in the current Tory manifesto. Last year the bureaucratic body tasked with making it happen – the Big Society Network – was investigated last year after claims that its funding had been misused. And its former chief executive, Steve Moore, is now working for a political party whose sole intention is to legalise marijuana.
Cameron is a politician without vision, leading a party without direction. This election campaign he has relied on cheap scare tactics, painting Ed Miliband as both an incompetent geek and a terrifying socialist, while offering policies that appeal to select portions of the electorate, and alienate the rest.
The number of people who will be devastated by the sell-off of housing association property planned by the Conservatives far outweighs the number who will benefit from it, but that is of no consequence. The Tories have made a clear calculation that those people do not matter. There is nothing he won’t say, no one his party won’t demonise to win. The ends justifies the means.
Five years of getting tough with benefits cheats and work-shy scroungers has led to the United Nations investigating the UK for grave human rights violations of disabled people. But the public remain supportive of the Tory stance on welfare, so mission accomplished.
From Churchill to Thatcher, Cameron’s predecessors were people of substance: Churchill an historian and artist of some merit, and Thatcher a industrial chemist. Yet Cameron’s most notable achievement outside politics is working as head of PR for Carlton during the 1990s, when its productions included “TV's Naughtiest Blunders” and “Schofield’s TV Gold”. If you were unkind, you might say that Cameron’s first job was peddling crap to the masses, and his time in politics has been much the same.
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