Friday, September 22, 2006
Toff to Thrash Scot
Superb article by my good friend George Walden. George tells truth to power, a tough job when the powerful persist in denying how powerful they are. For him, David Cameron, like Blair, is a condescending toff, a familiar figure in British politics. I'm not quite sure how George will feel about the poll in the same edition of the Guardian which shows that people prefer Cameron to Gordon Brown for just about every imaginable reason. The one question they didn't ask was whether they prefer a Toff to a Scot. But I think I know the answer. This will provide Blair with further justification for what I suspect may have been his game plan all along - to keep his job through the next election. All he has to say is that a leadership contest will be too divisive and all his spin-fiends have to say is that polls show that Brown wouldn't win anyway. I am probably wrong, I dislike and know little about politics. But, in case I'm right, you read it here first.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
In kindly drawing attention to my Guardian article today about David Cameron ("Yes, Im the Great Condescender..." - to the tune of the Platters) my friend Bryan asked how I would react to the news that he's way ahead of Gordon Brown in the popularity stakes. The answer is that the English, bless them, don't mind people pissing on them so long as it's from a great height. My more stately explanation comes at the end of the piece: "By stooping even lower than Tony Blair [to ingratiate themselves with the masses] the Tory new elites have once again come to be seen as the natural party of government. To me it seems clear beyond doubt that Cameron will become Prime Minister after the next election, even in a hung Parliament. If so it would be the biggest triumph of the new elites since the apotheosis of Diana. Such a result would also confirm one of our least admirable national traits: the irresistible English urge to deference - in this case deference towards the privileged and well-to-do masquerading as themselves."(The article is the preface, incidentally, to a new edition of The New Elites, Gibson Square Books. George Walden
ReplyDeleteAny justification to the idea that Blair couldn't give a crap about the Labour Party and is actually intentionally paving the way for his blue-blooded colleague Cameron to take the reins of power, their allegiance instead being to groups such as the Bilderbergers? Party politics being as it is merely a masquerade for the great unwashed?
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