Tory donors don’t like the Cameron line on Israel — or on very much else

Since David Cameron announced plans to change the Conservative party’s logo, derisive suggestions have come pouring in. A white flag to depict ideological surrender, perhaps, a spinning weathervane or a sinking Titanic. There have been so many spoofs that the favourite to succeed the ‘torch of freedom’ — a green tree — also looks like a hoax. It is intended to represent security, environmentalism and Englishness. It is simply bad luck that it is so similar to the national flag of Lebanon.

Perhaps there is a subliminal message here. Last weekend, Mr Cameron firmly backed William Hague in saying that ‘elements of the Israeli response [to Hezbollah] were disproportionate… and I think the Prime Minister should have said that’. His point was quite clear: Labour may not be prepared to criticise Israeli excesses, but the Conservatives now are — and thus, according to the polls, stand alongside 63 per cent of the British public.

Before he left for the Corfu villa where he is holidaying with Andrew Feldman, his friend and fundraiser, Mr Cameron took a call from one of his advisers. ‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing? Are you prepared for the backlash that will now follow?’ He laughed it off, saying he and Mr Hague spoke as unshakeable, but candid, friends of Israel. And almost no one in the party, he said, was angry.

It is a peculiar trademark of the Middle East conflict that sympathies are ascertained not by the logic expressed but by the vocabulary used. Are bombs being dropped by the Israeli air force, or Israeli warplanes? Were the Israeli soldiers ‘captured’ or ‘kidnapped’? But the political litmus test, recognised from Canberra to Washington, is whether or not Israel’s military response can be described as ‘disproportionate’.