Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Ukip’s puppet David Cameron cuts a pathetic figure

Well this is a pleasant surprise. After all the years of indifference, David Cameron has condescended to notice us. Not just notice us but want us too. His come-hither smiles and fluttering eyelashes are enough to bring a blush to the cheek.

Faced with losing yet another by-election, the Prime Minister is telling  Labour and Liberal Democrat voters that they (we) should vote Conservative to stop Ukip in Rochester and – presumably – in every seat in Britain where Ukip is a contender come May.

OK, I can hear my friends and comrades asking: what’s the deal? What do we get in return for calming our heaving stomachs and handing Cameron our support?

Perhaps he will offer us an end to his class war from above. He might regret cutting taxes for the richest earners on £150k plus or saying that the best way he could imagine to make Britain a better place is to raise the inheritance tax threshold to £1,000,000.

I think I speak for us all when I say we’d sit up, pay attention then, and give him a hearing.

So what’s it to be? Yes? No? Come on, man, spit it out.

Perhaps not. OK, maybe he and the ridiculous Boris Johnson could stop condemning Labour and the Liberal Democrats for wanting to increase property taxes on fantastically expensive houses. Perhaps Cameron could say he too thinks it wrong that a Russian oligarch in a £15 million Mayfair mansion pays no more tax that a struggling couple who have mortgaged their life away to buy an unremarkable flat in a dowdy part of town.

Instead of expending all his sympathy on the tiny number of widows in £2 million plus homes, who may not be able to afford more tax but can, nevertheless, sell up, release space to a family which can use it more efficiently, and pocket a vast, unearned and untaxed capital gain, Cameron might worry about the housing of the less fortunate.

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