David Cameron is the first Conservative Prime Minister since Margaret Thatcher to win two consecutive General Elections. The man does not deserve that honour. In fact, he has been so un-conservative that he completely alienated the grassroots of the party, to the point that they felt that had no voice whatsoever. Indeed, I dare say that the insufferable antics of the Cameron-Osborne duo were a major factor in the founding of this website. The Conservative Woman was established to correct the liberal Cameroons just as much as anyone on the political left.
Yet, I would be lying if I said I was sad at the election results. It’s a bittersweet victory for those of us who want a true conservative government, and know that Cameron won’t deliver. But even I am surprised at how relieved I feel at the news of a Conservative majority in Parliament. Call me naïve, but there is a glimmer of hope. Without the yoke of the Coalition, there can be a more robust debate now between the Cameroons and the real conservatives in the party. Again, this is where The Conservative Woman plays a vital role, in correcting the uber-liberal modernisers of the party. Bring it on.
And think of what this election means. All those biased BBC audiences. All the lefty-liberal media, always doing their utmost to stifle any kind of conservatism – even the fake kind espoused by Cameron. Against all these odds, the Conservatives still won.
While the Labour party licks its wounds and does a post-mortem, most people want to point the finger at Ed Miliband. But the man was in an impossible position. He does come across like a bossy, insecure, over-grown sixth former, it is true. But that wasn’t his real problem. His real problem was Nicola Sturgeon.
Truly, Sturgeon won the election for Cameron. The turning point – for me, anyway – was during one of the televised debates, when she turned to Miliband and coaxed him to join her on the Dark Side. ‘Together, we can lock the Tories out of power’, she crooned. Try saying that 20 times fast to yourself in your strongest Scottish accent. It’s enough to put the fear of God into any right-thinking person, no matter what theirpolitical party.
Poor Ed. He tried to fend her off (think of Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back: ‘No! I’ll never join you!’), but in the end he couldn’t give a convincing reason why a major political party like Labour should remain aloof from other minor ‘anti-Tory’ parties. That made him look both too confident in his fight against Cameron, but also as if he would rather side with Cameron than with the socialist SNP.
On the other hand, if there was going to be a Labour-SNP coalition, we all knew who was going to wear that pants in that relationship. The Queen of Scots was going to call the shots, no matter if SNP was in the minority. It would be death by socialism for Britain, and fast. It wasn’t a risk that the English were willing to take. So thanks to Sturgeon, Cameron won.
We started with Thatcher, and we end with Thatcher. Sturgeon has said that her passion for politics stems from a hatred of Margaret Thatcher. She hated everything that Thatcher stood for, apparently. Perhaps that hatred drives at least some of Sturgeon’s drive for Scottish Independence. And this week we learned that Mhairi Black, the 20-year-old SNP politics student who became the youngest MP in hundreds of years, was also raised on a hatred of Margaret Thatcher. I’m not great at math but if she is 20 then presumably she was born in 1995, five years after Thatcher left office. So she has no memory of Thatcher in office herself; she has learned this hatred, therefore, at her mother’s knee.
I said that David Cameron did not deserve to be the first Conservative Prime Minister since Thatcher to win two consecutive General Elections, and I meant it. But in some ways, this election was rather Thatcher-esque. It was very much about rejecting a very potent form of socialism, not so much about voting in Cameron. It was about electing a government that, although it may not be conservative, would at least be better at restraining itself than a Labour/SNP coalition.
And, for that reason, I am going to sleep better, at least for tonight.
