If Stuart Wheeler will stop funding the Tories if David Cameron brings back Ken Clarke, then why is he funding the Tories now? Why has he ever done so?
The Tories are the party of the Treaty of Rome, the Single European Act, the Maastricht Treaty, eighteen consecutive annual votes to approve the Common Agricultural Policy (with only the tiniest handful of rebels, towards the very hand), eighteen consecutive annual votes to approve the Common Fisheries Policy (likewise), the withdrawal of the whip from an infinitesimal number of MPs who merely abstained on increased British funding of the EU, the deselection of a Maastricht rebel and of no other MP ever on the European issue, the fake call for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty rather than for its simple rejection by Parliament, and the refusal to promise to campaign for a No vote in the extremely unlikely event of any such referendum.
Even the vague promise to revisit the CFP, an old Major hand like Michael Howard’s nod to Euroscepticism, has been ditched by Cameron, Michael Heseltine’s mini-me. The Tories have not left the European People’s Party, and they never will.
So why does Stuart Wheeler fund them? Why has he ever done so?
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Natural party of the wealthy... so, force of habit?
ReplyDeleteWe could ask a similar question of the unions and Labour...
Like the joke about the gambler who keeps losing, but persists in playing and losing yet more money.
When asked why he doesn't quit, he answers "Because it's the only game in town!"
But even Jimmy Goldsmith learnt in the end. And he was less Eurosceptical than Wheeler (the passage in favour of the ERM had to be cut from the English translation of his book, for example).
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