The return of moderniser Dave completes the Tory cycle of self-destruction

“As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool repeats his folly.” (Proverbs 26:11) That biblical text is apparently now the guiding inspiration of the Conservative party. The dogs in the street (to continue the canine metaphor) knew that the Tories were in a death spiral, as bereft of talent as of principle, but the conjuring of David Cameron as a revenant from the disastrous past gives that perception a chilling reality. Pace Karl Marx, in this instance history is repeating itself, first as tragedy and then as a Hammer Film.

That impression is reinforced by a distant croak from the crypt, as Lord Heseltine, the Ghost of Managed Decline Past, lavishes praise on Cameron, claiming that his appointment sends the “clearest signal that the sort of right-wing lurch that we’ve seen and the anti-European movement that we’ve seen has been put to bed, and that will get a message across to people.”

Will it? Where exactly was the “right-wing lurch” that Heseltine claimed to have detected? Where, for that matter, is the “right wing” in the contemporary Conservative party? There remains just a handful of MPs who could, with any credibility, be described as right-wing, or even as conservative. On examination, the right-wing lurch seems to consist of no more than the former home secretary voicing the opinion of much of the British public in condemning pro-Hamas demonstrations, the trashing of Remembrance weekend and the active complicity of the police in these anti-British outrages.

Obviously, in Tory Britain, we cannot have a home secretary who is in touch with public opinion – that would be populism (democracy, to give it its old name), pandering to the wishes of the mob (alias the electorate), so Suella Braverman had to go. As is the axiom in contemporary Britain, she was sacked for being right. The other main players, Rishi Sunak and Met police chief Sir Mark Rowley, both got it badly wrong, so stay in place.

According to Lord Heseltine, both the right-wing lurch and “the anti-European movement” have been “put to bed”. By “the anti-European movement”, the noble lord, Lord Heseltine, presumably means Brexit, the formally expressed will of 17.4 million voters, which he and his associates sought to frustrate. Unfortunately, Heseltine is living in the past. The days when the Tory leadership had the power to put anyone or anything “to bed” are long gone. Next year, the Conservative party will itself be put to bed, permanently and irrevocably.

If anything makes that certain destination even more assured, it is the return of Cameron. The egregious Dave, the tieless “moderniser”, was the leader who first set the Conservative party on the road to ruin. His vacuous metropolitan liberalism, the fact that his mind was a conviction-free zone – insofar as he had any ideological mentors, they turned out to be Saul Alinsky, the über-Trot, and Tony Blair, the Great Charlatan, to whom he and his acolytes referred reverently as “The Master”.

Cameron’s elitist sense of entitlement led him, without recourse to a manifesto commitment, royal commission, or referendum, to alter the royal succession on the back of an envelope, to a system that will eventually, on average, cause a change of dynasty around three times per century, causing the monarchy to drift far from its historical roots. Only the fortuitous birth of Prince George has temporarily deferred that outcome. If Cameron’s Heath-Robinson system of royal succession had been in force at the time of Queen Victoria’s death, she would briefly have been succeeded by her daughter as Victoria II, for six months, after which Kaiser Wilhelm II would have inherited the British throne. Nice one, Dave: a real essay-crisis piece of statecraft.

Having taken an axe to the apex of the constitution, Call-Me-Dave then set about turning marriage, the keystone of society, into everything that it is not. For that act of vandalism, which a majority of his own MPs refused to support, he relied on Labour votes. He has since confessed that he did so at the urging of his wife – the same kind of uxorious pressure that caused Boris Johnson to impose net zero. Tory leaders have become pathetic.

So, what benefits will Lord Cameron of Greensill bring to his doomed party? Experience, claim the other occupants of the Titanic deck chairs. What experience? The experience of not even trying to gain any serious concessions from the EU to avert a referendum. Dave was not bothered (did he look bothered?), since he was confident of victory due to his ingrained sense of entitlement. No prime minister in British history has been so decisively repudiated by the electorate as Cameron, in 2016, by 17.4 million voters.

Yet here he is, back in one of the highest offices of state. From the point of view of a clown like Rishi Sunak, it is an ideal appointment. It signals the Conservative party is a broad church, embracing all shades of opinion from social democratic to woke, having no truck with those distasteful millions of populists who pollute the voters’ roll. All the Sir Buftons on the slime-green benches are making the appropriate “hear, hear” noises.

Analysts claim we are at the most dangerous phase in history since the Cuba Crisis. War is blazing in Ukraine, the Middle East and potentially other theatres. But the foreign secretary, at this critical juncture, cannot be held accountable by the House of Commons. This appointment sends a message that there is nobody of sufficient talent on the Tory benches to fill the office of foreign secretary, that is why a shop-soiled re-tread like Cameron is being drafted in.

But the most important message it sends is that even a token dissenter such as Suella Braverman cannot be tolerated within a Conservative party that stands four-square with the leftist politicised police and all the other national institutions that have been conquered by the ultra-Left. Over the weekend, Britain’s enemies were given licence to trash our most solemn ritual of remembrance, with Union flags rare as hens’ teeth and a foreign flag associated with brutal terrorism ubiquitous.

“We are in charge now,” the demonstrations proclaimed, “and we will trample your despised culture and traditions because the British establishment is on our side. What are you going to do about it?”

The answer to that, from a public bruised by the contempt of its enemies and the betrayal of its politicians, is crystallising into one primary objective: to remove from power permanently those who have delivered us up to our bitter enemies. The one, overarching necessity, if we aspire ever to reclaim our country and heritage, is to destroy the political organisation that is responsible for our humiliation. It is time to put the Conservative party to bed. This farcical Alice-in-Wonderland cabinet reshuffle will actively assist that process. 

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