A Tacit Admission of Nastiness

The Tories wanted you to think that their friendship with the Polish Law and Justice Party was benign, that all the allegations against them of homophobia were all in our imagination. Why then has David Cameron sent out gay Tory MP Nick Herbert to take part in Warsaw Pride:

David Cameron is to dispatch the most senior gay member of his frontbench team to Poland to encourage the Tories’ rightwing allies in the European parliament to abandon their homophobic views.

In a move designed to defuse criticism in tonight’s leaders’ television debate that the Tories have allied themselves with extremists in the EU, Cameron has revealed that the shadow environment secretary, Nick Herbert, will attend a gay rights march in Warsaw in July.

Cameron told the Guardian that Herbert’s trip to Poland is designed to persuade the highly conservative Law and Justice party to embark on a “journey” to moderate its views on sexuality.

Last year that wasn’t important. Last year they were going to get away with masking their nastiness rather than having to genuinely grow up as a political party and move away from it. But with Cameron so far eclipsed by Clegg in the opinion polls, whoever is actually running the campaign is getting worried. They should be: this manoevre confirms the Tory leadership knows it’s running a party just as nasty as it used to be. There is a terrible schism between David Cameron and the party itself, and anyone thinking of voting for them should at the very least be deeply unsettled by this. Just who is David Cameron speaking for these days?

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