Thursday 22 April 2010

How the Tories are screwing it up

You could be forgiven for thinking that there was an unofficial contest taking place on the right at the moment to see who can give David Cameron the single most dud piece of advice. Nuke China! Replace police chiefs with politicians! Make Israel the centrepiece of your foreign policy attack on Nick Clegg in the next debate! Use George Osborne more! Actually, I made one of those up, admits Christopher Montgomery in the Guardian. I made up the one involving using the shadow chancellor more in a general election taking place during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. No one has called for that.


Osborne sums up everything that is wrong with Cameron's approach to leadership: he's not sinuous; he's not tough; he's not realistic; and he's not self-confident enough to reach out beyond a tiny, self-supporting clique. If he was any one of those things, let alone all four of them, Osborne would have been sacked years ago. Instead of being the gaping hole at the heart of the Tory campaign – as unable to land economic blows on Labour as he is to run a '40% campaign' – Cameron should have long ago replaced Osborne with someone capable of helping win an election.

Whatever Cameron's character failings, I keep coming back to the bad advice. Much as he keeps getting it. The latest idiocy is to attack Clegg on his expenses. Really? The one party leader whose immediate family directly benefitted from the expenses scandal – some of Cameron's colleagues spent their taxpayer-funded lolly in Cameron's mother-in-law's high-end tat shop – is going to go down this path? If Cameron really is foolish enough to say to Clegg, "you're as bad as I am", what does he think Clegg's going to say in reply? "When did you know your shadow cabinet colleagues were spending public funds in Oka, and why didn't you stop them?" would be my guess, but I suppose we'll see during the next television debate.

Read the full Guardian article here.