The Tawdry Tories

Peter Hitchens writes:

How long can David Cameron’s bodyguard of media toadies continue to protect the Tory Party from the criticism it so richly deserves? Mr Cameron, weak and vacillating under the slightest pressure, veers from one economic policy to another according to focus groups rather than the state of the nation. His pipsqueak Shadow Chancellor, quite without business experience, alarms the City with his amateur blundering.

The party’s single biggest donor won’t say if he pays taxes in Britain. One senior official sells a huge number of shares in his own company shortly before a profits warning causes the price to tumble. Another has won a large contract in a minor Balkan state, whose EU membership Mr Cameron is promoting. Then Mr Cameron makes a speech calling for probity. Probity begins at home, I think.

Then there’s the bizarre soap opera that swirls around the lovely head of candidate Joanne Cash, who quit and then came back, and whose engaging slogan is ‘RIP Dinosaurs’, by which she presumably means ‘Death to old-fashioned patriotic conservatives’. Almost everyone involved seems either to be blonde or a lawyer or a millionaire – the sort who has made his money in some incomprehensible ‘consultancy’. Or all three.

But my favourite bit is the claim that the local party computer crashed because it was overloaded with homosexual pornography. Not exactly the party of the people, is it? And if you loathe Gordon Brown, then just imagine what this lot will be like after a couple of years in government, if they can’t even get a grip on themselves in opposition.

I don't hold with pretty people in politics, among other fields. They had too many other calls on their time in adolescence.