Oh dear; it really is turning into a comedy act

Ian G

It would appear that the Obama effect really is rubbing off on them.

Jacquie R

You miss the point on prisons and the crime rate. The fact is that the reoffending rate of former prisoners has been rising. The prisons are so overcrowded and underfunded that, far from providing rehabilitation, they are creating more crime.

Augustus

How could this happen? But they do try. My how they try! And not many people know this, but David Cameron is a good dancer.

Tom

I didn't just lose interest in politics when the coalition formed.

I lost all hope.

Nicholas Hallam

I'm not sure why Cameron is so keen to make it plain to the US that he regards the UK as junior partners, but whatever one may think of his views he is evidently an educated man and is aware that the Battle of Britain did not involve US forces.

Clegg on the other hand showed yesterday that he hasn't quite got used to being in power and is more comfortable as the leader of a minority party sniping from the sidelines.

David D

Perhaps the real message that a good degree or a brain the size of a planet doesn't mean you know what you are doing.

Simon Stephenson

"Far from seamless competence, the new government seems to be careering about all over the place, full of people from the PM downwards shooting their mouths off without the slightest regard for the facts."

Facts? No government announcement has been about facts since Sir John Major was Prime Minister. Everything is about giving the right message, the right impression, and, I'm afraid, the facts just have to fit their way in round this imperative.

Liz

Unbelievable. But, alas, not unexpected. At least there's a possibility that Cameron was embarrassed by his history gaffe. Nick Clegg, on the other hand, is an ignorant and dangerous fool. The Liberal Party since the days of Jeremy Thorpe, has been the refuge of the chinless, brainless wonders of Britain. Nothing good will come of this unholy coalition.

William Boyd

Good points from one whose quote "Gaza’s GDP is almost as high as Turkey’s" only a few days ago was a mere 6,500% or so off the mark :-)

But right about the comedy act. I can't see it holding much longer myself: indeed it's a joke.

TomTom

I don't think Cameron erred at all. I think he meant to 'disown' that Tory strand which treats 1940 with reverence. It was a part of his debunking of all that Margaret Thatcher's generation held in esteem.

Cameron is the cuckoo in the Conservative nest who will bring down the house and collapse the pillars. The Conservative members voted for their own destruction.

Funnily enough he also insulted millions of Indians who fought with the (British) Indian Army in Singapore, Burma, North Africa, Italy without whom Britain would never had had the manpower "to stand alone"

Dixon

Perhaps the comment was driven by a desire to see how far he could insert his nose up an Americans colon.

Margaret Muller-Johansson

Comedy Act Leftist style?

Braveheart

"the new government seems to be careering about all over the place, full of people from the PM downwards shooting their mouths off without the slightest regard for the facts."

It's called the Conservative Manifesto....

Baron

Jacquie R @ 12.44:

prisons, my blogging friend, should be foremost the places of punishment. You know, the miscreants feeling the pain for the vile acts they inflicted on their victims. Or you reckon prisons are here to educate those whom our top educational system failed to teach how to read, to rehabilitate those who like to indulge imbibing coke, to reshape those ….

Archie

Quite so, Miss Phillips! Further evidence that - in my personal experience - many of the most educated and degree-ridden people have not a grain of sense. (By the by, are the rest of the readers to be treated to your excellent piece on the oil spill which appeared in today's U.S. News?)

watttyler

Someone mentioned the Obama effect. You should have been able to predict it.

The question now is will the English in five years time have the wherewithal to dump the establishment as the Americans seem to want to, or will we wring our hands, tell ourselves and everyone else that a vote for UKIP would be a vote to let the Coalition back in, and reason that Dianne Abbot (or whichever political pygmy it might be) is the better of two evils?

If it is the latter, and while Brussels rules it does not matter which establishment figure satisfies his own sense of entitlement in the titular role of Prime Minister.

useyourimagination

This is rather surprising from a person who graduated from Oxford with a first in PPE.

This is not the first foreign policy gaffe Dave has made. He did make a big one during the general election debate by categorising China along with Iran as a threat, which of course, Labour made a meal out of.

As for Clegg's so-called "gaffe", it's time cut through the fog of propaganda on these issues. The Iraq war was a mistake and so was Afghanistan.

Britain has to find its own voice in the world, now that the 'special relationship' is no longer special. A neo-imperialist foreign policy is definitely not the way to go.

Derek Pasquill

Who remembers the rose garden now?

When the rose is faded,
Memory may still dwell on
Her beauty shadowed,
And the sweet smell gone.

Walter de la Mare

JSMill

The British Empire (not just Britain) stood alone in 1940 against Germany, as others have pointed out, using troops from Australia, NZ, India and elsewhere.

But Melanie's not much better in saying "‘the 1940s’. But again as historians have pointed out, this hardly makes it any better, since it was Britain which drove the war strategy during those years and deployed and lost more troops."

Er no in the war against Germany that may be true enough of the European front against Germany but the US was very heavily committed in the Pacific as well, and one really ought to mention too that in Europe it was Russia who defeated Germany in the field. The Western Allies made a significant contribution by tying up some German forces and, more to the point, bombing German factories and contributing materials to the Russians, but let's face facts the Russians paid the most blood by a very, very long shot.

Kieran E

I think you're overreacting in this article. I wasn't even aware anyone was purring over the compentency of the new government, in fact almost every thing I've seen written or said about it has caveats about its internal divisions and the problems therein all over it. Now a couple of gaffes, which are just gaffes, and your piece seems to be suggesting it is beyond redemption.

I'm a bit ambivalent on the Coalition in truth, being supportive of a merger of Conservative and Lob Dem policies in theory but not necessarily in the form it always takes, but the hysteria over every perceived or even real gaffe is preposterous.

It was annoying when commentators jumped on every slight gaffe of the last government and blew it out of proportion, not least because I for one felt there were plenty of substantive things to criticize instead (there always will be after more than a decade), but for a government which we all knew from the start was going to be a tricky balancing act and is still in its infancy? Just ridiculous.

Graeme

Cameron knows little about WWII history. firstly, America entered the war in December 1941 not 1940 and secondly, Britain did not become the junior partner in the wartime coalition until Mid 1944. Up until July 1944, the majority of fighting was done by Britain Commonwealth troops. After this date, the Americans become the dominant partner in the wartime coalition and Britain became the junior partner only then. This was noted by leading British politicians, I think it was Anthony Eden, the then Foreign Secretary under Churchill, that Britain was always consulted about strategy by the Americans and treated as an equal until mid 1944 and after this date America started to ride roughshod over Britain. This I believe is not unrelated to the fact that after July 1944, the US Armed Forces started to do the majority of the fighting. Do not ask me how these figures were computed as I simply don't know. America becoming the dominant partner was compared to the Romans taking over the Greek Empire without the Greeks actually realising what was happening. I did a presentation at university to my class on Anglo-American relations during WWII as part of the British Foreign policy course I was studying. In this post, I have tried to give an academic and professional response using sober, historical accounts and not just anti-Cameron, anti-Obama prejudices. David Cameron should resign over these rather silly comments.

Hadrian

Cameron, far from belittling his own, beleaguered nation at the hands of thw Yanks and that Brit hater, Obama, should have been giving them a kick up the backside for their hysterical and hypocritical response to the BP oil disaster.
Cameron's '1940 junior partner' remark simply goes to show even an Oxbridge degree these days guarantees very little.

Robin

Archie:

For the others who haven't perhaps seen the article, it's here:

http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/?p=755

Robin

George Steiner

When I lived in England, I was a card carrying liberal European intellectual from central Europe. I placed great value on being cultivated, highly educated, erudite. Such people so I believed were the only ones capable of dealing with the problems of the world.

As a consequence I looked down on the simpleminded, primitive, uncultivated Americans. Until I moved to North America, lived and worked amongst Americans. It became clear after awhile that being highly educated, cultivated and erudite is not required to solve the problems of the wold.

In fact it is better to have the kind of qualities the Americans poses in large measure. It is clear to me now that the British have never understood this.

Dixon

No doubt he also thinks (if thats the word) that the Enigma machine was captured by black Americans, as recounted by Hollywood.

Noa

Dixon July 24th, 2010 5:55pm

"No doubt he also thinks (if thats the word) that the Enigma machine was captured by black Americans, as recounted by Hollywood..."

You mean it wasn't? damnation... looks like my other bet on a GE before Christmas is also 'at risk' then.

Ronnie

It's just awful, awful. There is no hope, we're doomed.

Fortunately there is a long queue of people available to tell us how awful things are. Thanks to God.

TomTom

George Steiner makes an interesting comment for someone I believe to be a Balliol man. In fact it is simply Herman Hesse's Glass Bead Game. The British, resource-poor in every sense, liver in a literary world of whimsy whereas the German component of the Us identity is to Make, Do, Build

stu

It beggars belief to have these clowns running the show.....

"The study of the deeds of our ancestors is more than an antiquarian pastime, it is an immunological precaution."

Umberto Eco [The Search for the Perfect Language]

Romo

And now Cameron's making nicey-nicey with the new Middle Eastern nutcase Erdogan. Where's Cameron been? Hasn't he seen the footage from the Gaza flotilla? Is he so obtuse not to know that the whole thing was organised by his new best friend Erdogan? Gaza 'a prison camp'? Yes, for Gilad Shalit it's a prison camp. I knew when I voted for him that I should hold my nose. Never again. The Conservatives have had it with me. Totally disenfranchised. Sickening. So this is real politic?

Dixon

HO ho ho...to the many here who were so recently trumpeting the downfall of Brown and their desire for a Dave government, who ignored the warnings of myself and others......TOLD YOU SO!!!!!!!!

Oh how I love that phrase.