Lord Cameron, Foreign Secretary, former Prime Minister, made his maiden speech in the House of Lords today. Along the way there was a gentle dig at Boris: “Nor am I Cincinnatus hovering over my plough. I leave all classical allusions, and indeed illusions for that matter, to another former Prime Minister with whom I shared a number of educational experiences.”
Cincinnatus was a Roman statesman renowned for his virtue. No parallels there then. But he was recalled to power for another go, a feat Johnson hopes to mimic.
Cameron spoke of the first time he visited the Lords, when he was briefly a parliamentary researcher in the 1980s.
“I watched, I think from just up there,” he said, raising a hand to point at the gallery, “as the late Lord Macmillan aged 90 leaning elegantly on a stick delivered his maiden speech. It was a thoughtful, measured evisceration of the late Lady Thatcher’s government and its handling of the miners’ strike.”
Cameron said he intended to make no such attack on Rishi Sunak, his successor, though there were three other PMs in-between. Cameron lavished praise on Sunak, hailing him as a strong and capable Prime Minister. This sort of stuff – politeness, praise – has become incredibly rare in the upper echelons of the contemporary Conservative party. Could polite praise now catch on? Doubtful.
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