Let the Alan Duncan Incident Be a Warning to You, Mr Cameron

david

Months! weeks more like.

David

If only they were like Labour with MPs like Harman, educated at, oh hang on, St Paul's. Er, Blair? No, Fettes...um....

Alexandrovich

I found Cameron's little soundbite this evening quite telling: "The NHS is incredibly important to me and my family."

I think he must have meant 'the NHS is, incredibly, important to me and my family'.

Jeremy

"It is astonishing in the 21st century that they have been given even a sniff of power."

Not after the last twelve years of Labour government, it isn't.

"Someone will bray or guffaw or sneer or in some way demonstrate how completely they fail to understand how people live."

I agree with you that there is this risk attendant upon a Tory government. It was precisely this tendancy which did so much public harm to John Major's administration. But I suspect that Cameron - being, in any case, cut from a different cloth - will be aware of how offputting public displays of sneering arrogance are, and will have taken some care to ensure that the members of his party do not indulge in it. At least, I would certainly hope that to be the case. Quite apart from anything else, public displays of arrogance and triumphalism are vicious, vulgar and ungentlemanly. Those tendancies, if indulged, will prove - as they have proved in the past - to be catastrophic vote losers for the Tories. I should hope that Cameron has enough character, sensibility and education to see this for himself and to have taken the necessary steps to ensure that his MPs abide by the common courtesies of public behaviour.

In view of what I have written above, I would not consider Alan Duncan to be a "posh Tory".

To state the obvious, the politics of class hatred divide and therebye weaken the nation - and it is the unity, health and wellbeing of the nation as a whole which is paramount. Believing that, as I do, is one of the reasons which inclines me to the Tory approach to politics in the first place.

Although I must say that in my own personal experience I have suffered a good deal of unprovoked prejudice and abuse from the working class - something which I ascribe to their seeming ignorance of the norms of civilized social intercourse (i.e. good manners).

Judy

You're incredibly kind to Duncan, heaven knows why. I thought what he said and the insouciant way he said it demonstrated exactly what you said Cameron had to be afraid of. And almost everyone who saw or heard it felt that.

Cameron has made a very bad mistake in letting him stay in place. A lot of people are going to feel very indignant indeed that he was allowed to get off with a harmless rebuke and an obviously shamefaced, insincere apology

Nicholas

Eh? You ignore the Labour beam to take a pop at the Tory sawdust? Give me the odd sneering guffaw any day over 12 long years of arrogance, hypocrisy and "we know what's good for you". Perhaps it's the inherent wealth that makes them less grasping, personally ambitious or corrupt than most Labour "personalities".

Your cartoon "good vs evil" is quite the wrong way round.

Fergus Pickering

You mean that Duncan and Osborne were heckling, don't you? If upper-class heckling is braying then what is Labour lower-class heckling? I know. It is yobbishness. Ah well, braying or yobbishness. You pays your money... By the way, is Duncan uper class or even upper crust. He was a trader, wasn't he? A lot of them are common as muck. Rich though, filthy rich.

Rhoda Klapp

Yeah, cos all the labour troughers are in touch with their constituents. No problem there.

I actually agree with your concerns with the tories and their candidates. But I read into this some sort of idea that labour are OK in comparison. They are not. In fact our entire political class as severely lacking in the qualities required to be allowed to participate in democracy. If you don't KNOW that, you are part of the problem.

Ray

Too right, Nicholas. I just can imagine Mandelson nudging Brown and hissing "we can't trust these plebs to vote in a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty"

Steve.W

Braying is like mockney in reverse and part of out heritage. It's still a free country and politicians can choose which one suits them best. Tony Blair was very good at mockney, that always made me feel cold.

steve

the name 'daniel hannan' springs to mind here...

also you might want to say more about the reason why Cameron leapt to his defence. it's not just because, as the press has been spun it, 'he was saying what a lot of MPs think'.

Ultimately Cameron has a very narrow set of people who he trusts in the party, who he needs more than they need him given the certainty of the (narrow) win at the next election.

and duncan is one of them.

Oh - and he (and you) were wrong about the Venezuela deal. Care to devote as much time to hounding the utter shambles of the Johnson admin at City Hall, Martin? Why not?

Steve

It is astonishing in the 21st century that they have been given even a sniff of power. - and then you say Tony Blair expunged class hatred from his party. This analysisis is very telling of why Labour will lose. Why is someone detached from reality if they went to private school and are wealthy? Are you trying to say state school / working class = reality. Private school / wealth = fantasy. Utter nonsense.

Heaven forbid we should elect people who are well educated and are successful in business!

Hils

Blair did not expunge traditional class hatred - it's just a different class they hate: the self-reliant, law abiding middle class.

Sue

So, class hatred has been expunged from from Labour Party! That's fantastic news.

Evidence, please.

Original Tony

Martin...what a load of biased, partisan hogwosh.

You make posh, wealthy people sound like a disease, which is food for the typical left-wing hate-fest. It is the posh and wealthy that are paying taxes to support the lazy layabouts that swell labour's ranks.

And this rabble have been voting FOR the posh Tory boys and putting the boot into labour all over the country.

So much for a warning not to be posh, the former labour voters are saying 'I dont care about their wealth, their values are better than labour's'

JohnAnt

Martin makes a good point. I would put it slightly differently, and say that it is the Cameroonies' privileged position and their fear of betraying their true character and motives that prevents them from espousing truly Conservative policies. They simply cannot think fairly, and so have to maintain a pseudo-egalitarian (and crypto-socialist) posture instead. Blair-in-Blue, in other words.
Their aim appears to be self-advancement and the protection of the landed and property-owning classes. I can find no sincerity in their words and actions. Duncan has merely let the cat out of the bag.
Oh, and: being grateful that some poor sod was forced to beggar himself with taxes he can't afford to pay, to subsidise your family's medical treatment that you were in a far better position to pay for yourself, simply shows the unconsciously selfish instincts of the political class - no longer any surprises there.
If one more politician tells me how 'grateful' he or she is for the NHS, I'll throw up.

mac

"It is astonishing in the 21st century that they have been given even a sniff of power."

You what? 12 years of Brown and you write this?
Admit it, you'd vote for an amoeba if it sported a red rosette, wouldn't you?

But you're right about the preening squirt Duncan.

John Bracewell

I fear Duncan is a loose cannon who could well do great damage during an election campaign. With any luck he will be sent away during the campaign, otherwise, Cameron has a big headache there.