Blair was the first
Labour Leader, and to date the last, to take that view of his activists,
although he did hold it very strongly indeed.
But it has been compulsory for Conservative Leaders and aspirant Leaders ever since the 1920s. For the perfectly
simple reason that they would all have been Liberals if the First World War and
its aftermath had not rendered that party no vehicle for the ambitions of
anyone who wished to become Prime Minister.
Have those offended anywhere else to go? They might have. But it's not UKIP. UKIP has not been taken over by the Gladstone-without-God brigade. UKIP is the Gladstone-without-God brigade, simply nothing to do with conservatism or Toryism in the slightest.
It was in favour of same-sex "marriage" until Cameron decided to legislate for that. It remains in favour of the legalisation of drugs and prostitution because that is what the "free" market requires. The sense of making it up while going along, very reminiscent of Thatcher and Blair, has tipped over into farce with the opposition to an HS2 programme far more limited than that which was in UKIP's own manifesto in 2010.
Its opposition to the EU is based on an utterly absurd saloon bar fantasy of what the thing is. That entirely ignores, well, pretty much everything, not least the record of the venerated Margaret Thatcher while in office, and correspondingly the true source and nature of the only consistent and factually based critique of the EU, which has always been, and which remains, on the Left.
Blair failed where Thatcher had succeeded, in taking a party despised by its Leader and replacing it with a mere extension of the often capricious will of that intellectually half-formed Leader, a person easily flattered, and easily swayed by whoever had been the last actually or ostensibly clever person to have bent his or her ear. UKIP is another such extension.
In their respective last days as Prime Minister, both Thatcher and Blair were claiming the right and the ability to carry on in office even beyond a General Election while, "You can have whoever the hell you like to lead your precious party."
The only people who want to be in a personality cult of a party are swivel-eyed loons. Such are those who have still never got over the fall of Tony Blair. And such are those who have still never even managed to get over the fall of Margaret Thatcher. UKIP is a party comprised solely of the latter.
But what little remains of the Conservative Party is now even more swivel-eyed and loony than that, being made up exclusively of Thatcher flame-keepers everywhere except the very top, but exclusively of Blair flame-keepers, now extremely rare in Blair's own nominal party, at that apex of its life.
If you think Cameron is alone in believing his own activists to be loons, you haven't read Dan Hodges today.
ReplyDeleteHe describes a conversation with one of Ed Miliband's Ministers.
""I suggested to one Shadow Cabinet member that what Miliband needed now was a big, game-changing speech, similar to Kinnock’s famous attack on Militant in 1985... ‘Who’s Ed going to attack?’ he laughed. ‘All the crazies in the party are people Ed counts on for support.’
Your own party regards those upon whom it depends as "crazies" (poor Len McCluskey, eh?).
Oh, dear.
It seems in poor taste to call Hodges swivel-eyed, but he is undeniably a loon. A thoroughly embittered loon whom everyone knows is making it up.
ReplyDeleteThe Crazies in the Labour Party, such as there still are, are of course those still tending the dying flame of Tony Blair and David Miliband. Even Progress is no longer doing that, not really.
There is only Hodges. If he mattered, then he would be expelled. The fact that he isn't just goes to prove that he doesn't.