Showing posts with label New Statesman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New Statesman. Show all posts

Monday, 28 June 2010

Does Dave Exist?

Busy weekend, so only picked up my New Statesman half an hour ago to find a gem of an article by George Walden, ex-Tory MP and diplomat. Mr Walden does a fabulous filleting job on our very own Tory PM, David Cameron.

In George Waldon's view,  Mr Cameron is not real personality at all, but a "simulacrum", an imperfect image of reality. Exactly how imperfect, Mr Waldon is keen to show us.

Prize quotes
"...watching David Cameron in the leaders' TV debates, Cameron posing in front of No 10, Cameron impersonating a commoner in Whitehall, a spectre among the masses, who has not experienced a hallucinatory feeling, a sense of insubstantiality?" 
"....Churchill wrote history, Harold Macmillan published books, Margaret Thatcher was a lawyer and a chemist. Cameron shovelled TV trash into the maw of the masses. His way of making a crust, and why not? Ethically it is fine, in the way running an escort agency or a pole-dancing club is fine: the mugs are there to be conned and someone's going to do it. Just don't moralise at us when you have." 
In two pages of incisive and splenetic prose, Mr Walden skewers Cameron's insincerity and lack of substance in some  of the best written journalism I have encountered in many a year....

Read it and weep, tears of laughter and tears of frustration.