Thursday, January 30, 2014

David Cameron fails the Duke of Wellington test

Yesterday I blogged about Alan Massie's praise for Nick Clegg's political courage in entering a coalition with the Conservatives.

By chance, David Cameron was required to show political courage today and, put to the test, he flunked it. He funked it.

His backbenchers' amendment to stop foreign criminals using European human rights law to avoid deportation was incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. The home secretary told the House of Commons that.

So what does Cameron do? Does he tell his backbenchers to vote to honour our treaty obligations? No, he tells them to abstain and lets it be known that he has sympathy for their views.

It was sheer cowardice. More and more, David Cameron's premiership looks like an exercise in vanity.

He is on record as saying that he wanted to be prime minister because he believed he would "be rather good at it". But what he stands for remains a mystery even though he has now led the Conservative party for more than eight years.

Cameron lacks the courage to take his party decisively to the right or to face down the rabble that his backbenchers have become and to lack the political skills to maintain a middle way with dignity.

What the Duke of Wellington would think of him, I hate to think.

1 comment:

David said...

Cameron would have been no bloody good at La Haye Sainte. Wellington would have said, "The only thing I am afraid of is fear" or perhaps looking at the massed Tory scum, "I don't know what effect these men will have on the enemy, but by God, they terrify me."