DaveWatch

Gerald Warner writes:

Welcome to the launch of DaveWatch, an occasional feature on this blog which will monitor the demolition of the Conservative Party by David Cameron. For the second time in two decades we are witnessing the liquidation of a major political culture: Labour under Tony Blair and his Islington cronies in the 1990s, now Toryism at the hands of Dave and his Notting Hill clique of "modernisers".

The 'A' List of favoured candidates and all the other weasel initiatives aimed at "decontaminating the brand" - which actually means replacing Toryism with Blairism, the most contaminated brand in the universe - were the preliminaries to Dave securing political probate as the Heir of Blair. In this he has succeeded: the next general election will be a contest between Brown and Blair, with the interests and liberties of the British people a disregarded irrelevance.

Dave's challenge is to fool Conservative voters into putting him into Downing Street before they discover what he is actually about. In this ambition he has suffered a setback with the candid comments of Kenneth Clarke on the BBC's Politics Show last weekend. With regard to a British referendum on the Lisbon Treaty under a Conservative government, Clarke said: "If the Irish referendum endorses the treaty and ratification comes into effect, then our settled policy is quite clear that the treaty will not be reopened."

That is plain enough. If the Irish vote yes to Lisbon, as opinion polls indicate they will, the Tories will not hold a British referendum. The Irish will exercise our surrogate suffrage: Britain's future will be determined in the verdant glens of Kerry. This frank admission explains why the normally articulate William Hague was reduced to a rabbit in the headlights by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight a week ago, when he repeatedly refused to answer the simple question whether the Conservatives would hold a referendum if the treaty had already been ratified.

The answer is no; and that is Cameron's "settled policy". Otherwise spin doctors from Wisteria Mansions, headquarters of the Cameroon-occupied Conservative Party, would have flooded the media with repudiations of Clarke's statement, in a torrent of damage limitation. Now we know what "it will not rest there" means: a token attempt at renegotiating details of employment legislation, after Britain has been sold out and finally surrendered to Brussels.

Did Dave truly imagine he could evade an answer to this question until after the votes had been safely counted at the next general election? The harsh reality is this: a vote for the Conservatives under Cameron's leadership is a vote for the irretrievable integration of our country into a federal EU.

I know there are many patriotic, Conservative-inclined voters who flinch from such honest appraisal of Cameron. The vital thing is to get rid of Labour; Cameron is better than Brown; the Tories will come round; life would be more liveable under their rule... Sorry, but that kind of self-deception can only lead to disaster. Three months into a Cameron government, with Britain absorbed into Europe, protests ignored, the same PC tyranny, the same impotence in the face of mass immigration, the whole Blair agenda continuing, such comfort-seekers would recognise their mistake - too late.

The decades-old, arrogant mantra of liberal Tory grandees regarding their betrayed voters - "They have nowhere else to go" - no longer obtains. Dave will be responsible for the dissolution of the historic Tory Party. The question is: will you be helping or hindering this process?

And note that there is no commitment simply not to ratify Lisbon if it has not already been ratified on the emergence of a Cameron Government. Instead, there is to be a referendum, i.e., a month of the BBC on the subject, leading to a Yes vote.