In response to Kathy Gyngell: Cameron can’t win in a contest defined by Labour’s Big State fantasy politics, Earthenware wrote:
“Mr Cameron’s huge mistake was to buy into this game”
It certainly was a mistake and it will go down in history as defining his administration – alienating his core voters in order to pursue a constituency that will never vote Conservative.
But that’s the point, isn’t it? Cameron, Maude, Letwin et al knew perfectly well that such people could never be converted to conservatism. Their intention was to stop the Conservatives from being conservative as they believed that this was the only solution to the “nasty party” problem.
But they made three mistakes:
- They failed to understand that the British electorate votes in cycles. Tony Blair’s popularity was a reaction to the Thatcher/Major years. No Tory government was going to win against him when he was on a roll. Once the public wised up to him, however, they were ready for conservatism again.
- They calculated that conservative-minded voters had nowhere else to go. They reckoned without Mr Farage.
- Having split the right, the Tories proceeded to heap abuse on those who they had alienated. This reached its nadir when Boris Johnson accused us, at the Tory Party Conference, of having sex with vacuum cleaners.
The culmination of these miscalculations is that the Right is irrevocably spilt and the Tories will never again form a government.
A sea-change in British politics and it is all entirely self-inflicted. Cameron will rightly go down in history as the worst Conservative party leader ever.
