David Cameron has a complicated emotional relationship with the Conservative party. The
party picked him and follows him because it thinks he’s a winner. But it worries that the leader doesn’t love it, that he views the Tory party as a vehicle.
So when Ed Miliband threw the ‘son of Thatcher’ line at Cameron today, the Tory benches waited nervously to see how the PM would respond. As Cameron started off by making a rather lame joke about his mother being able to confirm that she was his mother, the Tory benches looked disappointed. Cameron appeared to be distancing himself from the party’s heroine. But when he changed gear and told Miliband, ‘I’d rather be a child of Thatcher than the son of Brown’, they went wild. Giving him one of the loudest cheers I have heard in the Chamber for a while.
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