Cameron is a PR ‘Spiv’

Simon Heffer sure believes so:

I do not yet despair of the Tories being the largest party on May 7. Whether they would be able to form a government is quite another matter. Whether they deserve to be able to form one is another still. Perhaps the meltdown at Tory HQ that we are told is under way, with talk beginning about who or what might come next, is an indication that a moral defeat has already taken place. We hear little about the “big idea” of the “big society”, which despite the efforts of propagandists died almost the second it left the womb. The public knows it is inadequate: the big idea it wants is about securing prosperity again, and the Tories are nowhere near a credible plan for that.

I wrote about Mr Cameron in November 2005, before he became leader, warning of the dangers of his dislike of policy, his obsession with style, his flexibility of principle, his absence of belief. “He is a PR spiv,” the piece concluded. “It is not enough.” Should he enter No 10 with a clear mandate, he will be justified in saying that the public thought there was more to him, and his image-driven project, than met the eye. However, his weaknesses have been cruelly exposed not by the rise of Nick Clegg, but by his failure to fight it adequately. For you cannot win a war without weapons, and Mr Cameron chose to disarm years ago.

It’s an analysis which makes sense of what happened in the first leaders debate last week. Clegg provided the style and the substance, leaving Cameron looking as hollow as he actually is. With Cameron having failed even to unite the right wing in Britain, and the opinion polls showing the left lining up very quickly behind Clegg, it’s no wonder the Tories’ campaign has started to panic. Cameron has relied almost entirely on rebranding the party as ‘no-longer-nasty’, but now we’re in the run-up to the election he’s finding a) they really are nasty and won’t be denied and b) he needs policies which actually have traction with the large swathe of the country utterly disillusioned with New Labour. He doesn’t have them, and it’ll be interesting to see whether the next two debates can continue to demonstrate that.

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