The Virtual Stoa

Pinched from Hopi Sen, who grabbed it from the Downing St website:

Back when David Cameron’s “A-List” of preferred Tory candidates was published in 2006, I ran a series of posts on the ten of them who struck me being as most entertaining, in one way or another. Where are they now – and, specifically, will any of them be in the House of Commons after 6 May?

1. Louise Bagshawe, the chick-lit author who once opined that President Bush’s tax cuts had “single-handedly pulled America out of the Clinton Recession”, is heading for victory in Corby.
2. Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones, ‘The Black Farmer’, who struck me as the most impressive of the A-Listees, seems to be heading for defeat in Chippenham to the Lib Dems’ Duncan Hames (whom I’m told is odious, though I don’t really know anything about him myself), but perhaps this one could still go either way.
3. Julie Rook is the councillor from Deal who was in favour of a local kid getting fined £80 for being overheard by a police officer using the words “fuck all” in conversation with a friend. She’s fighting Wolverhampton North East, where she just isn’t going to win.
4. Caroline Righton, the former TV-am presenter and author of The Life Audit, is in a close fight with the Lib Dems in St. Austell and Newquay, which she’ll probably lose if current levels of Lib Dem support hold up.
5. Anti-abortion campaigner Philippa Stroud is trying to dislodge the Lib Dems in Olga Maitland’s former stamping ground of Sutton & Cheam; it’s not clear she’s going to succeed.
6. Zac Goldsmith is trying to win Richmond Park from the Lib Dems, but I’m going to guess that he’s going to fail.
7. Priti Patel, who worked for the Referendum Party for two years (‘an amazing experience’), is PPC for Witham, wherever that is, and ought to take the seat comfortably.
8. Margot James may be the most prominent lesbian in today’s Conservative Party, and she’s fighting in Stourbridge, where she’ll beat Labour’s Lynda Waltho.
9. God may have called Hannah Parker to ‘follow a path into Politics’, but the ways of the Lord are mysterious, and right now He appears to be consigning her to defeat at the hands of incumbent Ben Bradshaw in Exeter. Could be an upset, I suppose, but I doubt it.
10. Amber Rudd, former professional ‘aristocracy coordinator’, seems to have a pretty good chance of knocking off Labour MP Michael Jabez Foster in Hastings & Rye.

So I’m guessing about half of this crowd will be returned. Not a bad hit-rate, but not quite as triumphant as it was all supposed to be once upon a time.

That’s enough pointing-and-laughing at the British National Party for a while. Now for a bit of pointing and laughing at the Tories…

I’ve never had much time for Cameron and Clegg, with Cameron modelling himself on Blair, and Clegg on Cameron. But what the election campaign is bringing out is the extent to which Cameron was only ever offering the most fraudulent impersonation of Blair, and that it’s because of this that the Clegg-as-Cameron strategy is working out so very nicely for the Liberal Democrats.

The reason Blair was far more successful as a centrist politician than Cameron is managing to be is that he went out of his way to humiliate the Left of his party in public as a part of his move to the right. He chose to pick fights that he really didn’t have to fight, with the result that it made it all much easier for former Conservative voters to think that it was safe to vote Labour after all.

Cameron, by contrast, has made a lot of centrist noises, and he’s done various things that the Tory headbanger tendency doesn’t much like (stuff on the website about tackling homophobic bullying in schools, running more women candidates or candidates from ethnic minorities in winnable seats, banging on about the environment, usw), but he’s never seriously tried to stage a meaningful fight with the party’s Right, to lure them out into the open, and to slap them down in public. Bullying Norfolk South West into having Liz Truss as their PPC just doesn’t count, and when the Right tried to bully him, making it a condition of its support in the leadership campaign that he pledged to quit the European People’s Party in the European Parliament, he was happy to fall in line.  And one consequence of this kind of thing is that voters find it harder to take his centrist pretensions especially seriously.

And this is why Clegg is doing so well. Cameron’s strategy has been to try to bring centrist-minded, middle-class, non-lunatic voters into the Conservative orbit, and to fight the election as if this is the key demographic, but if you’re a C-M, M-C, N-L voter, and you want to vote for that kind of thing, there’s no good reason not to vote for the real thing (Clegg) rather than the dubious fraud (Cameron). Cameron’s only pretending to be Blair, and that’s what’s making it easy for Clegg to be what Cameron would like to be, but can’t, a politician operating entirely comfortably on the terrain of what we might call the centre-centre-right of British politics.

So we have the happy result that John Major won 31% in 1997, William Hague won 32% in 2001, Michael Howard won 33% in 2005, and David Cameron’s ‘decontaminated’ Tories are heading for, um, 34% in 2010. At this rate it’ll be another quarter century or so before they’re in spitting distance of a parliamentary majority. Happy days.

It is, however, all very funny. Over here.

This German PhD story [via] reminds me of that blissful moment in recent British political history (February 1994) when Michael Portillo went on one of his xenophobic rants about furreners, claiming that in Britain students earned their A-Levels rather than, as elsewhere in Europe, either buying them or ‘being a friend of the minister’s', only to be asked by some journalist or other just which EU countries in particular he had in mind, and could he explain what he did to acquire his Cambridge MA?

Over here.

The Mail on Sunday covers the issues that matter, over here [via].

Policy Exchange is basically a parody of what a think-thank is supposed to be — the proof of that is its decision to have the laughable Anthony Browne in a senior position for quite a while now — but people say that it’s fairly influential on Conservative party “thinking”, so perhaps we should pay attention. So here’s a link to a page on its new report, which you can download, that recommends that Oxford (current population, c.150,000) should grow by an order of magnitude or so, with a million new homes being built around the city.

Since it’s the Conservatives on the County Council who have been opposing a very modest urban extension of Oxford on land south of Grenoble Road (a mere four thousand houses), a right-wing U-turn of quite staggering proportions may be on the cards. Alternatively, people may decide that it’s best, all things considered, to ignore pretty much everything that Policy Exchange has to say.

Extraordinary story.

[There's an old page about him from the Tory Party website in the Google cache here.]

Should we have a new Bank Holiday to celebrate Britishness Polishness? Conservative MP Daniel Kawczynski makes the case this morning on the radio, over the fold.

(What is it about the voters of Shrewsbury, anyway, who first sent the great Lib Dem erotic poet Paul Marsden to Westminster, and now this chap?)

(more…)

Under the Tories’ new plans, can lesbians just write “David Cameron”, “George Osbourne” or perhaps even “Andrew Lansley” in the bit of the form where they have to mention a “male role model”, or is it a bit more complicated than that?

From tehgraun [via] :

“This is like the March on Rome in 1922,” one shadow minister said as [Boris] Johnson inched towards victory.

I wonder which shadow minister that was? For pictures of some fascists celebrating victory in the mayoral election in Rome last week, try over here.

Tristram Hunt:

Now, I have no problem with a ministry of all the talents, but when the big tent ushers in the former Tory party chairman Kenneth Baker, the progressive consensus has truly lost the plot.

Young people today probably have little idea who Kenneth Baker is. (Curiously, this Wikipedia article doesn’t mention his major contribution to British Government, which was his prominent role in the early stages of the poll tax fiasco.) Perhaps we need a Museum of Britishness that could, among other things, explain his career to current and future generations? A gallery given over to the twists and turns of the Death to the Dogs crisis of May 1991 would be an excellent idea, for example, and children could be given free copies of the 1986 Green Paper, Paying for Local Government.

Oliver Kamm makes the correct point that Paul Foot’s book on The Rise of Enoch Powell is really very good indeed; Mary Beard provides a classicist’s perspective on his notorious speech; and Simon has a very interesting discusison of West Midlands Toryism.

UPDATE [4.45pm]: So, here‘s Hastilow’s article; here‘s the transcript of the “rivers of blood” speech, and there’s some blog-discussion by Tories here, here, here [ConservativeHome] and here [Iain Dale]. Also Michael White and Sunder Katwala on CiF.