Ah, you will say, all he had to do was stand there while Lembit Opik imploded. But that might be to underestimate him.
Because Davies has just written a blog post that shows a rare degree of good sense about the Coalition:
Sometimes my Conservative colleagues cause me despair. Never more than when they attack our coalition partners, the Lib Dems. I wonder what planet they're on whenever I hear references to "The tail wagging the dog". Some even advocate bringing down the coalition. Ill-considered nonsense in my opinion. Triumph of hope over reason. Its actually time for re-declarations of love, not filing for divorce.
Lets look at some of the facts.
1) The Conservatives did not win the last General Election. There was certainly a case for 'going it alone' at the time, and instigating another election in a year or so which would hopefully deliver victory - but we didn't. We took a clear direction and decided that the economic and financial challenges were such that a coalition was the better option. Nothing has changed.
2) Its was the Lib Dems who had to make the biggest concessions - admittedly because their manifesto was hopelessly undeliverable. They signed up to higher student fees - despite promising the opposite. They signed up to a VAT increase despite making such a big deal of opposing this.
3)They signed up to nuclear power despite being supposedly anti-nuclear. And the consequence of this is that their opinion poll support has bombed. They took the massive risk of growing up from being woolly hatted idealists into hard headed realists. It was courageous.
3)* Without the Lib Dems, the current Government wouldn't last long. OK, so fixed term parliaments are enshrined in law, but I do not believe we could limp on until 2015. I want to see Nick Clegg remain DPM, and the Coalition last the full five year term. I suggest some of my colleagues think how they'd feel with Ed Miliband as PM and Vince Cable/Tim Farron as DPM. Time they got real and stayed real.One of the sad things about the recent reshuffle is that it made it impossible to hold a favourable opinion of David Cameron.
Once you could believe he had grasped that the death of liberal Conservatism was his party great weakness and that he had co-opted the Liberal Democrats to fill the void. No longer. Either he has failed to recognise that truth or he lacks the courage to act upon it.
So I have a new Conservative hero. Glyn Davies for Tory leader!
* OK, so Maths isn't his strongest subject.
4 comments:
"They [the Lib Dems] signed up to a VAT increase despite making such a big deal of opposing this."
As if David Cameron never said during the election campaign: "We have absolutely no plans to raise VAT."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/election-2010/7625873/General-Election-2010-Cameron-dismisses-claim-Tories-would-put-up-VAT.html
Please don't let's pretend the Tories were any less dishonest about raising VAT than the Lib Dems.
"Lets look at some of the facts.
1) The Conservatives did not win the last General Election."
Not a fact, but a falsehood.
They got most votes, most seats and their leader became Prime Minister. That is to say: they won the election.
They din't win a majority and they didn't win the election outrght, but it's nonsense to say they lost the election (losing and not winning elections being identical; no-one has ever drawn an election.)
If Anonymous is correct, that makes Liberal Democrats more honest on this score, because Vince Cable when asked during the election campaign said that he could not absolutely rule out a VAT rise.
There were many of us who having seen Glyn Davies on local politics programmes or read his blog during his time in the Welsh Assembly knew that he would be a formidable Westminster candidate because he came across as such a reasonable bloke. It helped that he was grounded in the community as a farmer, not a product of the party's research department.
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