There are plenty of less than helpful quotes and statements in Vanity Fair’s article on David Cameron from people on the right that will no doubt be used by his opponents in the upcoming General Election campaign such as Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator saying, “I don’t believe for a minute he (David Cameron) believes protecting the N.H.S. is a good idea,” with some mixture of disdain and admiration.
Or this from Tory M.P. and Oxford friend Ed Vaizey “He is, I believe, much more conservative by nature than he acts, or than he is forced to be by political exigency,” That’s the same Ed Vaizey who said that David Cameron’s wife Samantha voted Labour in the past in Channel 4’s latest Dispatches programme.
Or this from a Party advisor Ian Osbourne “In U.S. terms, he could be a moderate Democrat,”
But the one thing from this article that genuinely could hurt David Cameron the most is the ‘Third Way’ charge of not having many strong views and being like former President Bill Clinton and Tony Blair both centre left politicians.
‘Cameron is basing his campaign and, too, his idea of the Third Way—this further chapter in Clintonian and Blair-ite politics—on his being the bulwark against disagreeable and ugly people and other nameless terrible things. And he is counting on the fact that fewer and fewer voters will ask those old-fashioned questions about identity and provenance, which, after all, in the modern world are, for so many people, ever changing and fluid.
“There’s a left-right spectrum—where are you? I don’t really do it like that,” Cameron said, both as explanation and obfuscation, during our January chat. “What I’ve tried to do is marry a belief in market economics with the importance of a strong economy while restoring the condition of the Conservatives’ being social reformers and also addressing the future—climate change and the environment. It’s the full kind of package.”
Is the UK ready for Tony Blair Mark 2?Any source
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