“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.”
