Dave, you’re a disappointment – but there’s still time to change that

Dear Dave,

There are few things more annoying than when an old friend writes to tell you what a hash you’re making of your life. Especially when the friend is a squitty hack/blogger and you’re a leader of the free world. God, how impertinent is that?

But there are things that old friends can see that newer friends wouldn’t dare tell you even if they were capable of noticing. Yeah, you’re Prime Minister and I’m not, but I’m really not jealous. I don’t judge friends’ success by the titles or positions they’ve accumulated, or by how rolling in money they are or how powerful they’ve become. What I ask myself is: ‘Given the advantages they’ve had and the opportunities they’ve been given, have they achieved their full potential?’ And in your case the answer is no. Or at best, a very feeble ‘Not yet’.

You and I go back a long way. Not as far as ‘School’ (as your lot call it) — but as far as mid-Eighties Oxford, when you, our mate James and I used to hang out in my rooms in Christ Church, smoke and listen to Supertramp albums. I’m not going to embarrass you with further personal revelations. Suffice to say that I found you likeable, charismatic and a general good egg. If somebody had told me then that one day you were going to end up as Prime Minister I would have been delighted. I mightn’t have put you in the Thatcher or Churchill league, but of one thing I would have been certain: no way, in your capable hands, would Britain end up as an economic basket case, torn apart by riots, crippled by the highest taxes and most pernicious regulations since the second world war, in thrall to the socialistic technocrats of the EU, brain-deadened and emasculated by the politically correct values of the Guardian and the BBC, without even the merest scintilla of a glimmer on the horizon that any of this was about to change till you were booted out of office.