Gerald Warner on Good Form

Just ninety minutes of PR candy-floss from a Liberal Democrat wide boy – that was all it took – and the papier-mâché construct that was Cameronian Pseudo-Conservatism crumpled and dissolved. Yesterday William Hague, the Cameronians’ best debater, was taken out in the course of the Daily Politics debate – a defeat analogous to Marshal Marmont surrendering Napoleon’s last army as the Allies closed in on Paris. Then the supposed fight-back election broadcast turned out to be a session of meaningless Daveguff delivered in a garden against a background of piano music, like an old silent movie. Vichy Toryism is assuming the past tense – the whole Potemkin village is collapsing.

Already, on last night’s edition of the Daily Politics, they were asking the teasing question: if Dave loses the election will he have to go? The answer, axiomatically, is yes, within 24 hours, and his whole tainted clique with him. Yet Michael Portillo, the first begetter of Tory “modernisation”, maintained he should stay (it would be fun watching him try); he also insisted that Cameron and his accomplices must not respond to their present emergency by venturing onto the topics of immigration or Europe, which Dave succeeded in removing from their agenda.

Whom the gods wish to destroy… The implosion of the Cameronian imposture is not difficult to understand. The nation is massively concerned about immigration, but the Cameronians refuse to discuss it, beyond a pledge to import “tens of thousands” a year. The only policy on immigration that would come within a mile of meeting public demand would be a total moratorium on incomers for a minimum of 10 years, accompanied by a focused and exhaustive drive to discover and expel all illegals. Nothing less will be seriously entertained as an “immigration policy” by the British public.

On Europe, the obvious Conservative policy would be to guarantee to hold two referenda within the lifetime of the next parliament. The first, to be held within six months of taking office, would be a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Yes, it would be a referendum on an already ratified treaty – AS WAS THE ONLY PRECEDENT, THE 1975 REFERENDUM ON EUROPE, after smirking Head Teeth misled us into the EEC. If the answer turned out to be No to Lisbon, Britain would unilaterally derogate from its provisions, followed by a further referendum on continued membership, Yes or No, of the European Union.

Other obvious policies would include the abolition of 90 per cent of quangos; the repeal by a single-clause Bill of all PC laws passed by Labour since 1997 as listed in an annexed schedule; an end of tinkering with the constitution but a Draconian crack-down instead on financial fraud by members of both Houses of Parliament with all offences criminalised; the scrapping of all proposed taxes, subsidies and other measures relating to the global warming myth; a referendum on the restoration of capital punishment; and the imposition of punitive sentencing for criminals, with victim status restored to the person against whom the offence was committed, instead of the perpetrator.

The tragedy is that any moderately competent Conservative leader offering such policies would now be within a couple of weeks of being swept to power on a landslide. Instead, Cameron and his clowns are fighting desperately for survival, after 13 years of the worst misrule Britain has ever experienced. They cannot organise a “fight-back” because they have no real policies beyond toy-town socialist fantasies such as “Big Society” (dear God!), no principles, no grounding in basic Conservative philosophy, no genuinely Tory instincts, no understanding of the people of this country and how they think and live.

The Vichy Tories live in a metropolitan cocoon, sharing a comfort zone of liberal-left political correctness with their supposed opponents in the other two main parties. They have used consensual complicity for half a century to frustrate the wishes of the nation on such issues as capital punishment and immigration. Mesmerised by the Great Charlatan Tony Blair, they imagined they could use the same marketing techniques to sell themselves into government. Dave has a masterly blueprint for winning the 1997 general election: in the 2010 contest he is hardly any longer a contender.