Put aside for a moment what you think of the prime minister politically. Obviously if you are anywhere on the Left, Cameron is the champion of austerity, Thatcher times ten. If you are a Daily Mail reader, Dave is a lily-livered liberal somewhere to the left of Trotsky. No, what I’m after today is trying to figure out if Cameron is operating under an intensely thought out game plan – or if he’s just stumbling around randomly hoping everything works out.
Take Europe. The papers have been awash with stories of how Cameron is going to have to perform a big “climb down”; that people like Tusk and Merkel are having him for breakfast. But what if everything that’s going on is carefully stage managed? By that I mean, what if Cameron worked everything out with the relevant Europeans months ago, and what we are seeing unfold is a gigantic phony war, at the end of which David Cameron gets to announce he’s got everything out of the EU he was aiming for? Genuinely, genuinely, I have no idea at all anymore. I flip back and forth between believing one thing and then the other several times each day.
Or the general election: was Cameron lucky or was the general election win all down to his tactical brilliance? Again, it’s easy to fall into thinking he was just very fortunate; or that the credit should lie with Osborne and/or Crosby and that Cameron was just a passenger. But I don’t know anymore. Seriously, I really don’t.
This is the thing with Cameron; it was always been the thing with Cameron, actually. He’s often been denounced as a mere PR man – all flash, no substance Dave. But if that’s the case, and it’s all down to luck, he is one of the luckiest people to ever have lived. No, I think some credit has to be handed to him for what he’s achieved. The problem is, I have no idea how much, and thus trying to figure out if he knows what he’s doing now is next to impossible as a result.
In regards to the negotiations with the European Union, I really do hope the prime minister is in fact a genius, if on this and no other area, because hey, I’d really, really like us to stay in. But like I say, I don’t know what to expect anymore from the man who has managed to remain leader of the Conservative Party for over ten years now.
Unless the wheels really come off the nation or the Conservative Party in the next decade, I think Cameron will be ranked with Baldwin, for similar reasons – another equivocating but calculating PM of mixed reputation who leanves one really not knowing if he was an opportunist, a cunning chancer or someone with a longterm plan in mind all along.
Of course, following the analogy through to the hilt would make Osborne Neville Chamberlain and Nick Clegg Ramsay Macdonald.
He’s 80% clever and deferred to good council and civil servants. But Europe is trickier and harder to control. But I suspect the game plan has been worked out. Likewise Cchq knew they would win election but could not let on. Expect a highly calculated machine that cam runs to deliver Europe. That is why he is a winner.