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As a regular reader of the Daily Telegraph Comments section and the on-line feedback from the readership, it is interesting to see how the Right of Centre and more Extreme Right Tories line up on the subject of David Cameron. The former understand and support his strategy, the latter led by idiots such as Simon Heffer, hate him and want a “bold costs/tax reduction program” spelt out before the next General Election which is a sure fire recipe for disaster.

The hard facts are by now understood by all and of all political persuasion, the public finances are in a dreadful mess with massive overspends on all major budgets and tax revenues falling in the face of an economic slowdown.

The Next Election will be May 2010

I think that it was Ian Martin in his DT blog today that having talked to some senior Labour MP summarised the Brown situation as follows: He won’t be deposed and will lead Labour into the next election because there is nobody of sufficient talent available to replace him. Replacing Brown and having another “unelected leader” would almost certainly trigger an election; Labour is currently broke and can’t afford to fight a General Election.

The conclusion must therefore be that Brown and Labour will hang on until the very last minute hoping “That something will turn up”, the downturn may be less than imagined, the Tories my hit serious turbulence over something and so on. The truth is that Labour has run out of steam, the country knows it and therefore we will go through the motions for another 22 months.

Back To the Tories

But herein lies the problem, Dave could launch a realistic campaign however, is the apparently, celebrity obsessed public ready to abandon the “singer” and instead concentrate on the “song” ? Could David Cameron get away with telling the truth as best he knows it to be which would be something like:

“Frankly I don’t know what I can do and won’t until you the electorate, give me the keys to No.10 and I’ve had the chance to assess the situation and especially the state of the public finances at that time. I would like to do “smaller government and lower taxation plus, devolving to the local level as many things as we sensibly can” but doing that properly will take time. Until I know the situation which we will inherit from the current Government, I cannot say whether we will have to both raise taxes and sack public sector employees… I especially cannot promise to implement too much in the way of radical policies for 2-3 years.”

The answer is the Tories would not get elected with an overall majority and to be honest, that Labour will lose in May 2010 is a slam dunk certainty but I wouldn’t rule out a hung Parliament as a possibility. The problem is that the British like first past the post, give the man the job and throw him out if he is useless.

What the UK needs most right now is not a “Mr Charisma” it needs a Henry VII, a damn good and ruthless administrator who would repeal much of the legislation of the past 11 years especially “Human Rights” bought in to disguise an increasing reduction in the rights of the citizen, probably negotiate a trade only relationship with Europe and simplify the basic Law back to something comprehensible to the average citizen.

Would the Public…

Would the public vote for that a sort of “blood, sweat and tears” period, the answer I suspect is no or not until the 11^th hour and 59^th minute. But do they want it, the answer is yes but not if they have to make the choice.

Oddly, the only person capable of doing this was Gordon Brown who came into the job projecting a dour competence that was appealing to many. His major mistake and long before the economy started unravelling was to show that at the bottom of it all, instead of being the “man of high principle” that the public expected, he was just another “grubby, power obsessed party hack” over the election that never was.

The problem is that the public need to suffer before they are ready to accept the tough medicine required to sort things out and even then reforming the Law and restoring Civil Liberties in these islands would take second place to the price of bread. Withdrawing from the EU and the jurisdiction of the European Courts would take at least 3-4 years by the time you unpicked all the various ramifications of what has become little better than legal bindweed, it would need a virtual Dictator running Parliament to make it happen.

David Cameron has a tough job on his hands but, I suspect that he is the man for the job and once we get to April/May of 2009, he will be able to start slowly and gradually putting some flesh on the bones of policies, interesting times especially with the Party Conference season almost upon us !