David Cameron: An idiot who's probably going to win the next election.
Cameron's pledge to bring an end to "Punch and Judy" politics has lasted all of a month.
It was accompanied, however, by a personal attack on Gordon Brown, the man he is expected to challenge in 2009 or 2010, which is seemingly at odds with his promise to avoid "Punch and Judy" politics.
Mr Cameron used a trio of Conservative inclined Sunday newspapers, the Sunday Telegraph, Sunday Times and Mail on Sunday, to woo potential Tory voters by saying he would govern for "the least well-off in society, not the rich" and insisting he will not be "the prisoner of an ideological past".
Well, of course. Seeing as all Cameron has done so far done is copy Blair, and Blair has never let any ideology (well, the only ideology he believes in is modernisation aka privatisation) get in the way of his policies, it's not much of a surprise that the only thing inside Cameron's head is a vacuum.
In a personal attack on the chancellor, Mr Cameron described him as sounding like a "speak your weight machine". He denounced Mr Brown for an "extreme" approach to the economy, which he said had seen the chancellor "take the proceeds of growth, borrow even more, spend massively, waste a lot ... leaving a massive debt hangover".
"He's a creature of the past to me, really, and by the next election he'll have been in office for 12 years and parliament for 27," said Mr Cameron, who has been an MP for four years. On the next election, he said: "This is going to be the choice people are going to make between a rather old-style 1980s approach to politics ... and a new approach I have.
"Gordon Brown is the old-style thump-thump-thump, and I think that's exactly what turns people off. I find [him] awful because it's just like listening to a speak your weight machine on propaganda."
He urged the prime minister to step aside and let his battle with Mr Brown commence: "It would be good for the country, now Blair has said he's going, that he got on and left."
So, uh, an extreme approach to the economy is to plow tax revenues of the taxpayers back into the national health service which benefits..... taxpayers. I guess compared to Thatcher that is rather extreme. Brown has also taxed the oil and gas companies, who have been making huge profits in order to fill the so-called blackhole in the government's finances. Mr Cameron would rather that they keep the money and stack up their pension pots further. If Gordon Brown is a creature of the past, then what is Tony Blair, who Cameron is so clearly modelling himself on? The Dear Leader entered politics at.... the 1983 election, coincedentally the same time as the chancellor. What seems to frighten Cameron so much is the possibility that his opponent might actually have some convictions. Cameron has been quick to dump all of his, such as the lead weight which was last year's Conservative party manifesto.
The whole media love-in with Cameron is sickening. While he perhaps deserved the benefit of the doubt to start with, he has already become exactly what many in the Conservative party actually probably feared: a Blair clone. What really matters now is whether the Tories are prepaped to throw off their ideological shackles and unite behind a man that already seems to have stolen Blair's previously Teflon coating. He's already broken his promise to get rid of punch and judy politics with this attack on Brown, while his smear merchants had already attacked John Prescott for daring to stand up for working class kids everywhere.
All of this though is pointless. Gordon Brown has already dropped all his past convictions. He won't deliver another speech like the one he did to the Labour party conference a couple of years ago, promising Real Labour. When he ended it with "at our best when we are Labour!" it almost felt like the disappointments and wars of the past few years might be worth it for a Brown premiership that was prepared to truly take the fight against inequality and not to pussy-foot around redistribution of wealth. All that has now vanished with the appearance of Cameron. While with Howard there was still a chance of the above, when Brown finally takes office he will be stuck dead in the centre with a Tory party that thinks it can win again. The Guardian today ran a leader praising the fact that there is now a real political choice for the first time in a generation. The absolute opposite is the truth. Labour and the Tories may as well now be the same party, with the Lib Dems fighting about whether they should be slightly to the left or slightly to the right of them. It seems that the new way is to have a vacuum where what you believe in should be. And one of those vacuums is already destined to be the next prime minister.
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