Don't Ask

Peter Hitchens writes:

David Cameron has twice refused to be interviewed by me, once for this newspaper and once for a TV programme I made about him for Channel Four. When I have sought to question him at Press conferences or public events, he has been highly reluctant to speak to me. I understand this reluctance, and take it as a compliment, but I do not think it is creditable or right.

A film star or a famous author may reasonably not want to talk to a hostile or critical journalist. And why should they? They have careers to boost or books to sell. What possible reason is there for them to expose themselves to cross-examination?

But Mr Cameron is not in showbusiness. He wants to be Prime Minister of this country with a huge influence over all our lives. Yet he is still quite startlingly unknown. Before he became leader of his party, he had held no office of state and had been in Parliament for less than five years. The only modern precedent for this extraordinary ascent from obscurity is an unattractive one – Anthony Blair, whose true nature most of us discovered too late. How can we form a proper judgment of him if he is unwilling to undergo critical or sceptical questioning?

I have noticed that Mr Cameron likes to be interviewed, where possible, by two types of people. The first sort are celebrity interviewers, poorly informed about politics and naturally interested in personality, family and gossip, whom he tends to enfold in his entourage for the day (or longer), taking them for a car-ride to his constituency and his country home, ending with a seductive brush with his charming young family.

The second group are political insiders, who can discuss the technical aspects of policy but who generally accept the conventional wisdom of Westminster and its very narrow range of opinions. If he has ever talked at length on the record to a conservative-minded critic, I have not seen the result.

So it struck me that the next best thing was to set out what I would ask him if he ever does grant me such an interview. By explaining what I think he hasn’t answered, and doesn’t want to answer, I can explain more clearly why I remain immune to his charms – and why proper patriotic conservatives should withhold their support from his project.

Here is the interview I would have if I could – though I should say here that I am keeping at least one important question in reserve, which I am saving for the Election campaign. You will have to imagine the answers unless and until Mr Cameron deigns to answer them:

1. Why won’t you discuss the many suggestions that you have used illegal drugs? The assertion that you are entitled to a ‘private past’ is open to question because your attitude to such drugs is also a question of public policy. One of the few strong policy positions you have ever taken was to put your name to a Home Affairs Committee report recommending highly liberal polices on cannabis and some other substances. Your fellow Tory on the committee, Angela Watkinson, refused to sign that report because she believed it was wrong, so your support cannot be written off as a passive act. Aren’t voters entitled to wonder if your ‘private past’, and the fear that it may emerge into public view, may have influenced your public policy? Wouldn’t you be freer to take a strong line against this major menace if you came clean and – if appropriate – expressed regrets?

2. You say you like Britain as it is, not as it was. Yet you also say that it is a broken society. How can you square these two positions? Surely Britain was broken mainly by the cultural revolution which swept away stable marriage and respect for the law, and encouraged the spread of drug-taking and drunkenness? And surely it was better as it was rather than as it is? One or the other. But not both.

3. You have strongly condemned the misuse of Parliamentary expenses by many of your MPs, and quite ruthlessly forced the early retirement of several of them on these grounds, though some others who are friendly to you have escaped this treatment. You have made it plain that the fact that a claim was ‘within the rules’ does not excuse greed. Yet you are by any standards a wealthy man. Your constituency is within commuting distance of London, and many who vote for you make this journey daily. So how can you justify asking taxpayers – teachers, school dinner ladies, bus drivers, nurses – to give you £20,000 a year in mortgage relief, close to the maximum permitted claim, to help you pay for what you yourself described as ‘a very large mortgage’ on a spacious country house worth around £1million?

4. Do you believe that, by holding a poorly-advertised lunchtime meeting in Witney, when most voters with jobs could not get there, by stationing officials at the door with lists to give it the appearance of a members-only gathering, and by cramming it with your own supporters, that you properly exposed yourself and your expenses claims to public scrutiny?

5. You frequently say you are in favour of decentralising power in this country. How do you square this with your increasingly centralised control of the Conservative Party and above all of the selection of candidates?

6. You favour the selection of women and ethnic minority members as candidates and have even toyed with the idea of women-only shortlists. Do you believe that women can only be properly represented by women and members of ethnic minorities can only be properly represented by members of the same minorities? In which case how can you, for instance, speak for the women and ethnic minorities of your Witney seat? Or are you, in fact, just Politically Correct?

7. You refuse to support those who want to restore selection on grounds of ability in state secondary schools. Yet you must be aware that most alleged comprehensives select on other grounds – mainly by catchment areas which close the better schools to the poor, who cannot afford to live in them. Your own child attends a heavily over-subscribed primary school which selects partially on the basis of religious commitment. When your children reach the age for secondary school, it is most unlikely that you will send them to bog-standard comprehensives. In that case you will presumably have to use wealth or faith to save them from this fate, routes closed to most people. Surely ability is a better and fairer basis on which to select pupils, in which case why not say so?

8. You made a ‘cast-iron guarantee’ of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. You must have known that there was a strong chance, verging on a certainty, that this treaty would be ratified by all EU nations before you were in a position to fulfil the pledge. Yet when this predictable event happened, you had no serious alternative policy. Weren’t you pretending to be tough on the EU, while in fact supporting the ‘ever-closer-union’ which is a condition of our membership?

9. You once said you were the ‘Heir to Blair’? Isn’t that exactly the problem?