Tim Montgomerie: Cameron must change his style of leadership

DavidDP

Montgomerie doesn't speak for the grass roots, despite his claims, and his idea of a different strategy is the one adopted by him and his chum IDS, which was disasterous and yet which he still plugs at any given opportunity. THe idea therefore that he has any strategic insight is preposterous.

paulg

Any dissent in the tory ranks is misguided. Cameron has had a cracking campaign.

If they force the issue - they will wish the bitch that bred them had never let them be born. They won't last a month in politics.

Rhoda Klapp

I hold no brief for Cameron, but they picked him and they went along, they must live with the result, better than the last three leaders achieved. This is no time for a real tory revolt, that time was years ago. Now they ought to give him a chance.

(I didn't vote tory, but my tory MP came in with a bigger majority.)

Butterfly

If Cameron cannot get an outright victory against what one of Labour's own candidates called the worst prime minister in history, what right has he to feel he's a good leader?

It doesn't get better than this for the Conservatives. Next time Labour won't be hamstrung by Brown.

What then? More Letwin lunacy?

The Man

It was obvious to many some weeks ago that the Tories had the wrong strategy. For not addressing this, the 'grandees', (whoever they are now) have only themselves to blame. That said, they should stick with Cameron and recognise that much of what he has done was both necessary and of benefit to the party. But Letwin, Hilton et al must go now and the planning start for a re-run within the next 18 months - on a fiscally rigorous but socially fair platform. And please shred all the Big Society guff. It was worthy but in no way was it a vote winner.

Ian Walker

The British electorate have very very carefully "engineered" a situation in which a Lib-Con deal is the only possible government.

This is their response to the expenses and lobbying scandals. The message is quite clear - let Clegg sort out parliament, and let Cameron and Osbourne sort out the defecit.

Ignore the message of the electorate at your peril. The bleatings of the "party faithful" might be loud and irritating, but power will keep them under control.

Richard of York

Where is the mandate to govern in Scotland?

Tories are now on a knife edge.....

Sham man has failed to deliver and spent all the families gold and treasure doing it.
He has to go now....lol

Happy days

Jane

Can I again remind you that David Cameron wooed many labour party supporters which was some achievemnent given the negative campaign by Gordon Brown which sought to put fear into voters regarding future tory budget cuts. I am astonished at the negative comment about the campaign. I thought it was inclusive and achieved its objective.

We are probably looking at another election this year. If the conservative party starts looking inward again then this does not bode well in a future poll.

Chris lancashire

I believe that Cameron has been a very effective leader of the Conservative party and will be an even more effective PM. That the Conservatives have achieved so much in overturning such a large Labour majority is largely down to him.

Dirty Euro

paulg Wow, that's right talk to those right wing tories like they deserve too.
Heathcoat Amory lost so the euroskeptic ideas failed.

Verity

I've just got up, and before I even have my first sip of tea I think Cameron should get the sack. He ran a ghastly, unappealing, bossy, egotistical campaign and demonstrated in spades that he has no leadership abilities at all. And he has no feel for other people.

The man's a fatuous, egotistical moron and if this is the best he could do against the train wreck of the last five years of Labour fascism and intrusion into private lives, minds and families, he is not worth his keep. Indeed, he's dangerous, because Labour will regroup and kick him out.

He didn't deliver a victory. Against the worst and most wicked government this country has ever endured, in our long, recorded history, he couldn't deliver a victory. The Tory high command should face facts and sack him now.

Churchill delivered a victory against Hitler, for God's sake. Cameron couldn't even deliver a victory against Gordon Brown.

Sack him now.

Michael

If Cameron has to offer Clegg a PR referendum, then they will be no better off compared to the situation if Labour offer the Libs the same. But they will have the poisoned chalice of running the next government, which may be shortlived.
Better to wait, let Lab/lib collapse...?

Kennybhoy

"Sham man has failed ...He has to go now....lol"

Whatever Wee Mentulla recommends has to be bad for the Conservatives.

stephen

IMHO Dave needs to watch his back and distance himself,[dump] Boy George

Jim

@RichardofYork: tell you what, let all those Labour MPS from north of the border go back there and run Scotland, and let the Tories run England. Then we both can be happy, no?

Scotland doesn't want the Tories, England doesn't want Labour. Say no more, where are the divorce papers?

Butterfly

We are indeed likely to have another election this year and Cameron will not have the headstart handed to him by Brown.

FRANK of Formby

After listening to Brown speech at Downing St.What a charlatan Brown is.

Rabyrover

Feel frustrated at the result? I do, especially as the 1200 UKIP votes in Wirral South allowed Labour to hold on with a majority of 500. How many seats did UKIP cost us?

djw2009

>>he must squash this dissent before it gathers pace

How? The parliamentary party would be stupid if it said nothing simply because that suited the career of an opportunist. Talk about turkeys voting for Christmas.

David Blackburn to Planet Earth. Beam down now!

Wight Tory

Are those the same Grandees that screwed the party through its actions in the 90's? Thought so, Dave should leave well alone. Those so called "easy" targets missed yesterday are insulting to the will of those who voted against the Conservatives. There seems to be an air of "them being ours by right" No you earn it and the people have spoken. What Dave decides is good enough for me, he got us this far, despite the Grandees, not because of them.

Willie de Peepul

A major contribution to the drubbing we got in 1997 was that the party had degenerated into a squabbling rabble.
If you really want to be pitched into the outer darkness at the next election, then go right ahead. But it might be better to get behind the leader now and help him all we can. Sniping newspaper columnists like Heffer and Platell please take note.

2trueblue

The press were behind Cameron in the end, the Xfactor producers never were and Cameron did well despite the vile negativity that was allowed.
Brown and Liebore are only interested in Liebore. Cameron will get his chance and we will have another election within the year. Reality on the financial side will focus peoples mind. Right now people think it is all ok because interest rates are low and unemployment has not yet peaked, too late we will realise what Liebore have really done. All in all very depressing.

Dirty Euro

Nick Clegg must not be a coward he must choose either labour or tory.
The man is a coward.
I feel betrayed. If he chooses tory fair enough, but we cannot have a stable government without a coalition.
Just choose someone you coward Clegg.

Colin

Does anyone know what share of the vote the Tories won in England?

Osred

RE:'Richard of York May 7th, 2010 1:15pm

Where is the mandate to govern in Scotland?'

Who gives a monkeys'? Let Scotland have its independence (aka European realignment) and its SNP/Labour MPs. And then we can get on with our own governance (and realignment). Result? - Happy Happy Days.

Lizzy

Someone has mentioned UKIP and then there's the Greens and even the BNP all of these smaller parties have made a difference by diluting votes cast. UKIP's following is the Europe question and BNP prey on immigration fears.
For instance, watching the first three results in Sunderland the BNP polled an almost uniform total of around 2,000 at each poll.
Without consulting each of those polls they may not have made any difference to the overall result but it has been a different story elsewhere.
Is it too much to ask that the Tories attack both topics more rigorously and bring those seemingly disenfranchised voters back into the fold.

MartinFatGuts

No commenters mention what a fantastic election strategy Labour ran. Don't vote us out - or you'll lose your job/benefits/tax credit/surestart. Considering the huge swathes of voters now reliant upon a public sector wage or benefits - Cameron's compassionate tory-ism went some way to mitigate this, I think - especially reference Ivan and the NHS. Without Dave's intrinsic niceness - Gordo the munificent would have already lied his way back into No.10 for 5 more years - he may well still manage that.

Rhoda Klapp

Where is the mandate to govern Scotland? I'd start looking in the Act of Union.

Short Sterling

Richard of York

Are you really happy?
Has Gordon done your party a favour?

Cameron will be PM

Happy?

Polly Gamma

Richard of Yawnk

Yer man needs to get himself down to the Nail Bar for a set of fingernails to cling on with - and quick!

Tariq

No matter who they chose as leader -- and does anyone seriously believe that David Davis would have done better? -- the Tories could not have won a comfortable majority without a historically massive swing in their favour. The Cameroons must have known all along that this wasn't on the cards, because Brown, for all his faults, is not Major, who by 1997 held a far slimmer majority than Brown did until last night, and who had been repeatedly undermined by his own party. And because Cameron, for all his attractive qualities, is not Blair, who was notably more successful in forcing a recalcitrant party to move with the times.

Chuck Unsworth

@ Verity

"I've just got up, and before I even have my first sip of tea I think Cameron should get the sack."

As always. So what's new?

Vulture

It would, of course, be absurd to knife Dave at this juncture.

But what the 'Grandees' must do is to insist that the appalling team around him responsible for the disastrous hopey-changey strategy be junked at once: Hilton, Oliver Leftwing and Francis Maude must, to quote Lloyd George, be drowned in a butt of Malmsey Wine without further delay.

Verity

Vulture - and his phone blocked from calling Obama for advice. "Please, Mr President, what would Alinsky advise me to do now that I've made such a mess of things over a long five-year period?"

Andrew S

Reality check is worthwhile - over 50% of the population is anti Tory. Given this a good result for PM Cameron.

TrevorsDen

its all very well --- but the man who came second in the tory leadership race flounced out of the shadow cabinet.

The notion that a different leader of campaign would have enf=ded up differently is pure speculation.

what has held the tories up from govt is the gerrymandered electoral system.

Simon Denis

Verity, you're a splenetic, destructive, impractical fool - and that is the courteous way to describe you. No wonder you sail under a "nom de guerre" for nobody could spout your extremist nonsense and hold up his head in polite society. Cameron got some things wrong - fine. Did Howard, did Duncan Smith, did Hague do so much better? A bit more anti-immigrant venom, you think (of the kind in which you appear to specialise), and they'd be home and dry? High and dry, more likely. To start the wrangling and recriminations on which the Veritys of this world appear to thrive would be suicidal madness for the Tory party. A couple of softly softly shuffles to the right whilst cooperating with the Liberals is the obvious way forward. Hardly anyone is interested in the sterile, backward looking, unlovely politics offered by too many of Cameron's critics - or character-assassins. Where can it lead? To moral ignominy or electoral disaster, nowhere else. True, immigration is too high and when Cameron at last spoke of bringing it down, it doubtless got him votes - good and true votes, too. You don't need to take Verity's "Expel the Muslims!" line to oppose the left's attempt to resettle the country. But equally, you have to live up to ethical standards in the real world. Norman Tebbit, no sloppy lefty, has told the readers of his blog - and very properly - that the sort of mass repatriations about which some of them seem to fantasise are simply not on. So come on, people. Cameron has not triumphed, for certain reasons on which we can all agree. Neither, however, has he bombed. We're half way up the hill; let's not throw ourselves back into the abyss from sheer extremist peevishness. It would be a foul, unseemly and degrading dereliction.

Michael Sw

Cameron has done and is doing very well. The Tories have not won this election because large sections of the North and Scotland are Sovietised, Labour fiefdoms, wedded to the public sector teat. The first past the post system is also rigged in favour of Labour in these areas - the turkeys living in these areas didn't want to vote for Christmas.

PayDirt

Cameron has been emphasising for a while now that he puts the country first, the implication being that renegades in his Party will not be pulling the strings. He needs to resist these so-called grandees, is he the Leader or not? Negotiate a deal with Clegg's LibDems. What's the problem? Is he Leader or not? The election map of UK is very revealing, big constitutional changes are in the offing to bring the regions together at the right level. Is some sort of Federal system needed to address the obviously different inclinations of the regions: Scotland, Wales, the South-West, Ulster?

perdix

I believe that when Cameron first went into the HoC he believed that it would take 2 elections for the Tories to win power. It seems that he has achieved this in one - albeit imperfectly.

BrianSJ

Given there is probably going to be another election soon, the Conservative Party's priority must be to get the vote rigging stopped in its tracks. Perhaps then we might know how well he would actually do.

AAE

Andrew S - your reality check should correctly read that over 50% OF THOSE WHO ACTUALLY VOTED are anti-tory. That leaves 35% of the electorate unaccounted for.

George Laird

Dear All

There was only one Tory MP in Scotland before the election; there is still one Tory MP after it.

The Tories are a dead party in Scotland.

Even their shiny ex MI6 spy and Chairman Andrew Fulton couldn’t move the public to vote.

Wrong policies and wrong people equal ignored.

Tory talk is always about being radical; their reality is all about status quo.

Kudos for winning England but Scotland is another matter.

The Tories need someone who understands how to connect with ordinary people at the bottom of the social ladder.

I have a cracking idea.

But Cameron would have to write to me personally.

It’s about reform but not as we know it.

Yours sincerely

George Laird
The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University

Michael Sweeney

The red-blooded Tory critics on this thread conveniently forget the role of the SDP in splitting the anti-Tory vote to secure Maggie's victories in the 80s (to say nothing of the Falklands War boost in '83). Thatcher was lucky with her opponents back then, and the mass de-industrialisation of that era (when the incapacity benefit rolls grew massively) has lost the post-industrial North and Scotland to this day.

Michael St George

Rabyrover, if Camera-on hadn't duplicitously reneged on his "cast-iron" guarantee of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, he would have mopped up all those UKIP votes and we wouldn't be in the mess we are now.

He could have done it again with 3 days to go when the EUSSR started openly musing about another IGC to amend Lisbon, which would require Parliamentary ratification - and he didn't.

And to hear him this afternoon, parroting all the LibDim eco-wackery green rubbish about "shared committment to a low carbon economy", makes one despair.

Madasafish

last two - sorry three - sorry four Tory Leaders were disasters.

Cameron comes along and wins nearly 90 seats - a record since 1932 and more than his four predecessors combined.

When you look at the facts , the inanity of the article and some of the comments are clear.

anne allan

It is very noticeable that David Cameron does much better when he doesn't have the incubus of CCHQ on his back.
Get shot of 90% of the hangers on, save us a shed load of money and let the man be true to himself.
Oh, and forget that A list nonsense.

vivienne birchall

Here we go again "grandees"putting their noses where they arent wanted,old and out of touch.DC worked himself into the ground for the torys unlike some!!I didnt think he could do it in just 1 election from where we were.but by working his socks off he has,people need to grow up and start believing in our cause.

ajs

You daft conservatives: don't you see that NOW is the time to stick together and stop this silly bickering. You won't have another chance, you silly dum-dums. Don't for Heaven's sake give it all away for the sake of your childish tantrums.
Sincerely, 76 year old student of politics and political behaviour:

ajs

Mr Laird at Glasgow:
We shall be very glad to let you have Scotland and its problems with either an SNP or a Labour Govt, very glad indeed. And you can have Mr Brown, too, as part of the bargain.
I never understood why English Kings ever wanted Scotland, anyway; the Romans came to that conclusion long before. Not worth the bother, and didn't even have central heating.

Victor Southern

Verity - give it break will you? It would not have mattered to you if Cameron had a majority of 100, you would have sneered away just the same. And, why should it matter to you? You don't live in this country at all - not even in Europe.

Worry about Mexican politics, I am sure there is plenty to concern you there.
For the record you are the most indefatigable bore and insufferable egotist who has ever posted here. That says a lot since we have several monomaniacs who spill their venom here almost daily.

Your only saving grace is that you are comprehensible, unlike Fat Bloke who lives inside the da Vinci Code.

Snowman

Madasafish @ 4.21:

After what this country has been through and more to the point will be through in the next few years even a dead fish would have done well.

Simon Denis @ 3.04:

If your ranting reflects the views of the mainstream conservatism than the result fits, I reckon.

Nobody critical of Cameron has ever suggested that he ought to move as far to the wall as Verity keeps banging about. A glance in that direction wouldn’t have come amiss though. Who on earth was going to be seduced by his pinky blue replica of the real thing? As it turned out not many, certainly not enough in numbers to get him to run the country. If he does deal now, his ‘conservative’ policies will get diluted further. What was the point?

Imagine what the response of the great unwashed would have been if he said on the issue you picked: we stop immigration until the fate of the 1mn or so illegals gets sorted out. No harm done to anyone who hasn’t yet arrived, no repatriation, no nastiness, all above board. You reckon the Duffys of this world would have abstained, do you?

Verity

Victor Southern - We have a brainy, rational, well-educated, conservative president in Mexico. Quite a contrast with Blighty.

John Mounsey

I find all this 'sack Cameron' stuff quite mystifying. OK, he hasn't quite reached the overall majority he needs, but he's come close which is pretty good considering the fact that he started from an extremely low base thanks to the idiocies of previous Tory oppositions. It's quite clear that the country has no stomach for the uncompromising, red-blooded Toryism of the type advocated by many on these blogs. I may agree with you, boys, but it ain't going to win us many votes.

As it is, it seems possible that Cameron will get his chance and in so doing will force a humiliating public exit from No 10 of Britain's worst-ever PM. More interestingly, we now have a situation where all the figures show that once again England has backed the Tories overwhelmingly and the Celtic fringe has backed the Socialists, thus denying the Tories a majority. Yet who is it that shells out for the extravagances of the latter? Yup, it's the voters of Old England - who are being dictated too by the three indigent countries attached to us. I think we may yet see the SNP's wish for a separate Scotland granted and perhaps that of Wales and Northern Ireland too. Really can't come too soon for me.

Verity

Snowman - Cameron wants to govern Britain - not to serve his country, but to use it as a stepping stone into a lifetime sinecure in the EU. In other words, Dave buys into global warming, swine flu, low carbon emissions, personally drilling wells in Malawi or wherever ... anything that's on the EUSSR agenda ... to pave the way for his own preferment.

In other words, Britain is to be used for the advancement of Dave, as it was for his hero, Tony, who missed out on the big one in the EUSSR but struck lucky in the US.

Snowman

Verity @ 6.31:

You may well be right, it’s hard to look into a man’s soul. Even if you wrong, the policies smell to me too of a pseudo-liberal take on things. Not crafted through cool thinking, but derived from feelings. The thing is, and I reckon that’s why you get pilloried by the mainstream conservative bloggers, that one has to dismantle the policies rather than their bearer.

Still, you keep at it from the sunny Mexico, a hit and hit again debate cannot do anyone any harm.

Joe

Cam's the Man. Good campaign. Nice guy.

Verity - what Victor Southern said.

Captain Christy

The UKIP vote alone cost the Conservatives 21 seats. Can any one of these idiots explain what benefit their action has given to the country ?

The Masked Marvel

Lacklustre campaign, my arse. Nobody at the Spectator gets the message even now that the class war is what caused the Tories to fail in their quest for a majority. Over and over again, Brown and media outlets like the BBC hammered home the class war rhetoric, and over and over again Speccie pundits dismissed the notion that it would work.

Every time someone with a northern accent was featured in a vox pops on the BBC, they were either sticking their tongue out at the camera when mentioning the Tories, or saying that they didn't think someone with Cameron's background could ever relate to the problems of ordinary people.

Worse still, when Brown brought up the House of Lords or PR or inheritance tax cuts for the rich during the debates, Cameron was literally back on his heels, unable to respond at all. The Conservatives' campaign had no answer to the class war rhetoric. Yes, Cameron's "We're all in this together" mantra sounded good, and he did make an effort to show his concern for and understanding of ordinary people. But the class issue was never confronted directly, and not one Tory ever openly addressed it, other than complaining about Brown's negative campaigning. At least 50 seats were lost due to the class war having been won ages ago, with the Tories on the losing side, forever paying penance.

When will you learn?