Skipper

I'm getting a bit bored of blogging on the Conservatives but they are having an election and us political junkies love nothing better. I've just read Timothy Garton Ash in The Guardian today and think he's managed to put into words what so many have been thinking and tacitly concluding-the mark of a top class columnist in my book. He deals with the closeness between Blair and Cameron, calling it 'Camerair'- his version of the word 'Butskellism' invented by the Economist in 1951 to express the closeness of thinking between RA Butler, the Tory Chancellor and Gaitskell, Labour's shadow.
He lists the obvious similarities- public school, Oxford, upper-middle class background - but goes on to spot others: the same verbless sentences('To give choice to parents. Freedom to schools'), the ready emoting, the 'ordinary bloke' self deprecation, the sentence which sounds good but means nothing. He also points out that both men offer the dire promise of a future elite rule by public school Oxbridge types as most of the aides to both men share similar backgrounds. TGA suggests Modern Compassionate Conservatism(MCC) will rival Blair's New Labour New Britain (NLNB).

A glimpse into the future which does not exactly inspire confidence but does provide evidence that Blair has changed our political culture as dramatically as Thatcher did before him. The one good thing, for me, which this represents is that the Thatcherite beast in the Tory psyche has been finally cornered and exorcised by the(allegedly)'coke' snorting Tory tyro.