“Well, Dave. Did you? Did you really?”
It was almost possible to feel sorry for David Cameron. A party conference speech as the first Conservative prime minister with an overall majority in 18 years should have been 60 minutes of unadulterated triumph. And yet, Cameron looked tired. The bags under his eyes were more pronounced, his hair looked greyer and his jacket seemed a size too small. Perhaps Dave now felt confident enough to abandon his beauty regime, but more likely the events of the past couple of weeks had taken their toll.
In particular, the publication of Lord Ashcroft’s hatchet job, Call Me Dave. However seriously Cameron wants to be taken as prime minister, he knew he was walking out to face a large audience – most of whom would spend much of the time wondering if he really did put his knob inside a pig’s mouth. Some might even have been wondering whether the pig was still alive and if it had recovered from the trauma. Liz Truss, the environment secretary, who is keen on children learning the names of animals, was probably wondering if Dave had called the porker Percy. Or Sweetheart. No matter that it may never have happened, the image of Dave and the pig is one that will not easily go away. Once thought, it cannot be unthought.
“Well, Dave. Did you? Did you really?”
Cameron began by treating the speech as an affirmation. “Every day, in every way, I am going to get better and better,” he said. He may have ostensibly been talking about the country, but his voice sounded as if it was more personal than that. He was fed up with people running down the country by calling it Great Britain: from now on it was to be called Greater Britain. This was just about the biggest policy announcement he got to make other than to denounce Jeremy Corbyn for being a Britain-hating traitor. That got the biggest ovation of the day.
“Well, Dave. Did you? Did you really?”
Sensing that it would be hard to get through the entire speech without referring to the Ashcroft book, he followed up Boris’s claim to have been a rugby tighthead with the revelation that he played as a hooker. That’s not something that will have come as a surprise to many in his party, as Dave has always been a bit of a political tart, shifting policies at will to the highest or most populist bidder. He might have been better off calling himself a right flanker. He was also game enough to suggest that he and Samantha had tried out every one of the 64 positions in the Joy of Tax, a book by Labour’s new economics guru, Richard Murphy, and that none of them had worked. He didn’t mention number 65. The one that bet the country’s future on pork belly futures.
“Well, Dave. Did you? Did you really?”
With the difficult stuff out of the way, Dave devoted the rest of his oration to his vision of a brighter, bluer future. Though one tinged with more than a hint of red as he shamelessly sought to speak beyond his immediate audience to disillusioned Labour voters. Politically, it was a clever move, if one involving a fair amount of fantasy thinking. No, not that fantasy.
Dave’s Greater Britain – sod that, let’s go for broke and call it Greatest Britain – would be based on diversity, equal opportunity, peace and love for everyone and doing the right thing. Strangely, animal rights, tax credits and the NHS didn’t get a mention, but that could have been because Dave was too busy explaining how the armed forces that he had spent the past five years demolishing was the envy of the entire world and how everyone in the country would own their own house within five years. “Generation Rent will become Generation Buy,” he announced proudly, as if the only thing that had been stopping people saving for a deposit for their own homes was that they had been squandering their cash on paying rent.
It was a bold, ambitious vision, but as Dave was only too keen to point out, he wouldn’t be around to pick up the tab at the next election in 2020. So what the hell? That would be someone else’s problem. Possibly Boris, the mayor of London, who received an unexpectedly affectionate mention. George got a moderate thumbs up, though the Bismarck reference to him as the iron chancellor might have stuck in the throat. Osborne is trying to lighten his image, not soften it. Theresa May got nothing, apart from a putdown of her nasty party speech. The home secretary is one little piggy who will be going wee, wee, wee all the way home.
With a final call for a Greatest, Greater, Great Britain, Dave invited Samantha on to the stage to share the applause. She didn’t look entirely thrilled at being used as more arm-candy and had a quiet word in her husband’s ear.
“Well, Dave. Did you? Did you really?”
