Yesterday it will have made George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, feel frightfully big and brave that he could, yet again, “defy” those calling for tax cuts. His advisers will have told him so: one of the first things you are taught in adviser school is that your client is only as big as his enemies and that, indeed, they can magnify him and his works. Similarly, some bright sparks will be telling Mr Cameron that full-scale civil war in the party, in which the Tebbitite-Redwoodite Right are roundly and soundly defeated, is just what he needs. Oliver Letwin has been saying this to all and sundry for some time.

There are some dangerous assumptions behind this assertion, however. The first is that the Right of the party (as Mr Cameron and his friends define it) is relatively small: it isn’t, neither among the base of activists nor in the parliamentary party. The second is that the desire to win the election will override the distaste many people feel for the lack of policy and the tree-hugging, bunny-hugging, hoodie-hugging cult Mr Cameron is trying to create: in many cases it will but, equally, in many it won’t, hence the considerable numbers of paid-up members who are also UKIP devotees. The third is that the “victory” Mr Cameron will be able to have over the “Right” – which he can easily achieve by refusing to listen to their concerns about policy, making no changes to his style, and consigning those who oppose him to outer darkness – will be final, triumphant, and absolute. It won’t. In politics, these things never are. And these people can, and will, do infinitely more damage to him and his ambitions than he imagines, precisely because they are about substance and not about image, and will increasingly engage with Labour on substantial matters.

Mr Cameron’s whole strategy is pinned upon appealing to the parts none of his predecessors could reach. To this end he recently made a grovelling apology to the people of Scotland for the wickedness of Mrs Thatcher. Last week, at a local government by-election in Markinch and Woodside East, in respectable Fifeshire, the result was as follows: SNP 55.7 per cent, Labour 24.2 per cent, Lib Dem 16 per cent, Conservatives 2.4 per cent.

A well-wisher who sent me this information says the party “worked hard” to get out its vote in what was always a difficult area, but it was still 60 per cent down on the last contest. There is no point telling Mr Cameron that the concerns of what Lord Falconer calls “ordinary people” are not reflected in the new-age, wind-turbine powered juice bar that is the modernised Tory party. ~Simon Heffer, The Daily Telegraph

This entire description seems to reflect a lot of what Cameron really represents: yet another faddish attempt to appear relevant and trendy, combined with his predictable toffy elitism and an increasingly tiresome desire to abandon Thatcherite principles when Labour succeeded as much as it has done because it made its peace, more or less, with Thatcher’s legacy.  Only a fool or a “compassionate conservative” (or a “liberal conservative”) wants to go back and start tearing down the record of the last successful Tory government as one of his defining features as a party leader.  It is one thing to acknowledge past mistakes and try to correct them–and goodness know the Tories made some mistakes with privatisation and the North–and quite another to attack what the bulk of your party actually believes simply to make yourself appear more appealing to the media.  Of course he is against tax reductions.  Why?  He does not say so explicitly, but it is hard not to conclude that he is against them because Maggie was for them. 

In spite of making some sensible noises on foreign policy last month, he has gone from one “groveling apology” to another, making sure that the one thing everyone will know about David Cameron is that He Is Not Margaret Thatcher.  Well, thanks, Dave, but you might have spared yourself the trouble, since no one was in any danger of confusing the two of you.  Lady Thatcher, whatever her flaws and failures, waved copies of Hayek’s economic works in the air, had her famous handbag and her reputation of being made of iron; Mr. Cameron has a reputation for riding his bicycle, staring worshipfully at Nelson Mandela and going to look at glaciers in Norway to see whether they are melting.  The decline in leadership is painfully obvious, and it is only because Labour has become stale and tired and has now turned to internecine warfare that Cameron now rides high in polling.  He has apparently mistaken this popularity for a result of something he has done, and thinks that his election as leader was an invitation to gut the party of its core.  He is mistaken, and he threatens to turn the Tories back into the basketcase of a group they have been these nine long years if he is not very careful to keep the “Redwoodite” types pacified.

In fact, cutting remarks about bunny-hugging aside, Cameron’s interest in conservation is not in itself the problem.  Let us not even begrudge the man his juice bar if he prefers it, but let us also not pretend that he will be winning back the North–or any British labourer–to the Tory side by appealing to the demographic that inhabits Richard and Ben Curtis comedy films.  The biggest problem is that everyone and his brother can see that he is interested in conservation because it is considered a modish, unorthodox and generally un-Tory thing to be interested in, whether or not there is anything necessarily strange about a Conservative taking an interest in such things.  It is these charges of opportunism and superficiality, rather than any turn towards unconventional but theoretically perfectly conservative views on conservation, that will continue to haunt Cameron because he lives up to the stereotype of the superficial opportunistic trimmer and does nothing to dispel the impression that his entire public persona is a cheap facade designed to trick voters.