Spoiling for the fight: David Cameron

The Economist: Spoiling for the fight: David Cameron

…It has become a platitude of political commentary in Britain to envy the drama that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton brought to American politics. But neither America nor most other democracies offers a spectacle to match the gladiatorial rawness of PMQs, which has itself rarely been so compelling as it is now. An irascible workaholic Scot, one of the architects of New Labour, faces a patrician Tory with unmistakably pukka vowels—a suave upstart who seems set to wrench away the premiership that Mr Brown waited ten covetous years to inherit from Tony Blair.

For some, however, there is something wrong with this picture of political combat. Because to some, especially in Britain’s right-wing commentariat, Mr Cameron scarcely seems a Tory at all….

…He [Cameron] understood that the Tories were still hobbled by a reputation, acquired (fairly or otherwise) in office, as callous, bigoted and sleazy. This was so poisonous and persistent that, in “blind tastings”, voters who liked Conservative policies withdrew their approval when they learnt the ideas were Tory ones. Mr Cameron embarked on a strategic campaign to detoxify the party brand; thus his much-ridiculed but calculated stunts, such as a husky-powered visit to a melting glacier to advertise his environmentalism, his call (though he never put it quite like this) for people to “hug a hoodie”, or a trip to Rwanda that unfortunately coincided with flooding in his Oxfordshire constituency. He ditched his party’s hostile views on gay rights and promoted ethnic-minority activists….