David Cameron — a marketing man with substance

Put to the South Atlantic test: Argentina’s president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner may prove too tough for Hillary Clinton and David Miliband, inset
12 April 2012

You have to be in the right mood for change. When you have been battered by the economy and violent European storms that seem to have lasted since about October, you might opt for the peace and quiet of the status quo.

Change worked for Barack Obama's election campaign, but that was principally a civil rights/youth movement — like a gigantic, idealistic version of the Facebook petition to save 6Music. Most of the young people who voted for Obama then put away their posters and went back to bed.

Sarah Palin's most brilliant putdown of Obama's ocean-parting electioneering rhetoric came in a recent address to a Tea Party meeting: "How's that hopey changey stuff workin' out for ya?" The audience yelped with bitter pleasure.

The British are temperamentally more sceptical than the Americans. Nobody defaced Obama's Hope poster. The focus groups who voted for David Cameron's poster campaign saw all the qualities but did not spot the obvious potential for satire. They had fatally airbrushed the character of the British public. My favourite from the many internet versions of the poster was the one of Cameron in a hoodie, with the slogan: " Yo plebs, we is all in dis ting together, yeah."

So when I received my latest "hopey, changey stuff" electioneering email from the Conservative party leader at the weekend, I could not suppress a sigh. Not now, Tigger, not that bright webcam face, looking like the new office team leader with yet another plan for reorganising everything.

The glum-looking group who sat behind David Cameron for his Brighton speech on Sunday seemed to feel as I did. Kenneth Clarke appeared knackered. Theresa May looked as if she might burst into tears.

Yet as Cameron spoke, I suddenly saw the sense of the boringly consuming and faintly ridiculous party reform. It was not merely an extended marketing campaign, there was a decent product at the heart of it.

It was also clever of Cameron to portray himself as a new CEO addressing the staff of a traditional company. The worst you could think was that here was a smart young man with some fresh ideas and you wished him luck. At best he was genuinely inspiring. It was terrific to talk of the country as a giant community — people power, not state power. Society is not the same as the state is the first mantra of Cameronism, and he puts it more tactfully than Mrs Thatcher managed.

Cameron does not yet have the big idea to equal the sale of council homes (although that was an idea of its age — if the Tories offered the poor a chance to enter the property market now they would not be called liberators but sub- prime sharks).

But he can express a coherent Conservative philosophy. The past should not be abandoned but it can be intelligently updated. I am perfectly happy with a Tory in liberal clothing.

Have we lost the spirit of the Falklands?

As British troops advanced towards Port Stanley in 1982, President Reagan telephoned Margaret Thatcher to suggest a ceasefire. He was worried that the venture looked like colonialism and might damage Washington's relationship with Latin America.

It is hard to listen to Mrs Thatcher's rebuff, in a transcript of the conversation released a decade later, without tears of laughter and admiration for her. Reagan is reduced to a plaintive stutter of "but Margaret ..." as she asks him how he would like it if this were America and Alaska and American blood had been spilt. Finally she silences him: "This is democracy and our island, and the very worst thing for democracy would be if we failed now."

I wonder how the conversation will go between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Foreign Secretary David Miliband on the Falklands oil-drilling row. A little less of the usual cooing and cuddling.

Hill-Mil may be no match for her longer-standing female BF Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, president of Argentina. I can certainly guess Clinton's response if Miliband asks the Americans to share intelligence with us again

Bags of fun at the Bush

A phrase I always find chilling is "release the inner child". Within my outer adult, I find more and more adults like Russian dolls diminishing to the centre.

Yet I could not help but be charmed by the Bush theatre party the other night to celebrate its expected transfer to the old Shepherd's Bush library. Actors dressed up as librarians, giant brown paper parcels opened to reveal performance artists, goody bags of whistles and bubble blowers and a candle-lit dinner.

The party was partly funded by donations from Westfield shopping centre, which has pledged to support the Bush. It is a wonderful thing to see the partnership between business and the arts in action.

Hail the deserving rich

We have become used to stories of the undeserving rich, so the £56 million Lottery couple, Nigel Page and Justine Laycock, are a shining advertisement for virtuous wealth.

At the start, they looked nice and had no criminal record. Then they moved into a carbon neutral eco-home, in the same neighbourhood, rather than shipping out to Florida. Finally, they give their old home to their loyal cleaner.

You can judge a person by their treatment of staff, as Gordon Brown has awkwardly discovered. I hope poor old Pauline North, the No 11 housekeeper sacked after 30 years' service at the Treasury, can find employment with the Lottery couple. If anyone can make it through the eye of a needle, they can.

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