I've only just got round to reading the Michael Wolff piece about David Cameron in Vanity Fair. Other bloggers (such as Peter Hoskin, Paul Waugh and Iain Martin) have already pointed out that Ed Vaizey seems to have embarrassed his leader again. Vaizey told Wolff that Cameron was "much more conservative by nature than he acts, or than he is forced to be by political exigency". But what interested me was the way Cameron rejected the whole left/right mindset. He told Wolff:
There's a left-right spectrum – where are you? I don't really do it like that ... What I've tried to do is marry a belief in market economics with the importance of a strong economy while restoring the condition of the Conservatives' being social reformers and also addressing the future – climate change and the environment. It's the full kind of package.
The whole article is quite jolly. It's not half as good as the profile the New York Times published last year, but it contains some choice quotes. I particularly enjoyed Boris Johnson's comic but rather scathing verdict on the Conservative leader's philosophy.
[Cameron has] alchemised a position of more or less glutinous consensus ... The lion lies down with a lamb, calf, and fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.
Fraser Nelson, the Spectator editor, told Wolff that he thought Cameron's rhetoric about the NHS was phoney.
I don't believe for a minute [Cameron] believes protecting the NHS is a good idea.
And Cameron himself, when asked to explain why he thought Sarah Palin was so popular in the US, suggested, politely, that he was baffled.
It's hard for us to understand, if I can put it that way.
