James Delingpole James Delingpole

Dave’s kept his head down, so let him chillax

issue 12 August 2017

David Cameron was in the news again this week after being paid £1 million a minute to give a speech explaining why Brexit was a terrible mistake at the annual Gay Stranglers’ Guild gala dinner at a brutal dictatorship in central Asia, before spending a week cruising the Baltic on the yacht of Putin’s second-favourite oligarch with the prettiest members of the Russian men’s lacrosse team.

No, wait. My bad. Had he done that, as we know from similar cases, he would have got off scot-free. Instead, the ex-PM did something far, far worse in the eyes of our ever watchful media: he was photographed enjoying himself at a Cotswolds pop festival with a glass of booze in one hand and a fag in the other.

The press launched themselves on Dave with all the ravenous glee of those evil- parasitic sea fleas that gnawed the leg of the Australian boy who went paddling in the sea off Melbourne and turned it into a jellied pulp (just Google it — but only once you’ve had your breakfast). That’s because, get this, our Dave hadn’t just been caught out-rageously letting his hair down at Wilderness Festival; he’d been photographed talking to a woman wearing a sequined jacket with a neon pink heart embroidered with the word ‘Corbyn’. Oh the hilarity!

According to the Independent (an online freesheet) it was Just. About. The. Most. Embarrassing. Thing. Ever. It quoted the jacket’s owner, Lucy Edwards, as saying: ‘He was so mad when he saw me walk off with what was on my back.’ Which I’m sure was exactly what Cameron thought — he wasn’t just being polite to a pushy stranger at a festival or anything.

The BBC, meanwhile, went for the smoking angle.

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