David Davis meeting
I attended a meeting today in Burgess Hill’s Mid Sussex Conservative Club between David Davis and Conservatives from West Sussex.
David Davis started badly. His speech was an amalgam of answers he gave on Thursday night’s Question Time with some more taken from his earlier speeches. It must be hard, I suppose, to always come up with something new when making a speech, but two days after Question Time is too soon to make the same joke with the same wording.
Then his speech finished, he started fielding questions and he showed why so many MPs are supporting him. His answers were correct, clear and showed why he is a leadership contender. He made references to policies on taxation, Europe (properly the EU), education, emmigration and crime. He explained how the Conservatives can win the next election and why non-Conservatives have in the past voted Conservative.
But.
There is a but.
In 2001 Michael Portillo entered a similar meeting held in Hove and everyone stopped. Portillo’s mere presence in a large garden made the conversation stop and all attention turn to him.
When Davis entered the room, I could not tell you, there was no similar hush. At one point Davis was standing next to me and I did not notice. When the formalities started he was introduced by Tim Loughton, my MP. Tim spoke and everyone listened in raptured silence. Now I admit, and I hope he doesn’t read this, Tim is an excellent MP, and he should be a leadership contender in the future, but he upstaged Davis. Tim has the charisma that Davis should have if he wants to persuade the general public. Davis’ policies are spot on, and Tim’s too; but Cameron, like Tim does, carries an audience with him.
Cameron’s performance on Thursday was not polished, but the public like him.
Never-be-converted socialists have told me that they do not want Cameron to win because he will beat Labour in 2009 or 2010.
Policies are not enough. In the May 2005 election the Tory’s policies were better than Labour’s. In 1997 the Labour manifesto was patently a lie from cover to cover, but you could have been forgiven for believing it. In 2005 that excuse was gone. The differentiator between the Tories and Labour from the public’s perspective was not policies, it was character.
Whatever lies Blair told, whatever injustice he allowed his Chancellor to perpetrate, people liked and believed Blair. Cameron can bring that, and only that one hopes, to the Tories.
Having seen Davis in the flesh I commend, in the strongest terms, Cameron. As does the DailyPropaganda.
This is a copy of a post from Gav’s website: GavPOLITICS
[Technorati: David Davis, David Cameron, Conservative, Tory, Tory Leadership, News and Politics]
I’ve been looking round this evening on the Tory web and blogosphere, and I’m beginning to warm to Cameron and go cool on Davis (I’m not with the party, at least not yet). I was really disappointed to see a moan about foreigners in British jails on Davis’ “people” page on the conservatives.org website - it seems like the “treat everyone like tabloid-reading bigots” tactics which got the party trounced in May. And his site is nearly all slogans and does not have much in the way of policy at all. The thing that really worries me about Cameron is his “school leaver programme”. What is this exactly? It’s too late for me, but I don’t want my children put through conscription, which is on its way out in every country which can afford to dispense with it.
Comment by Yusuf Smith — 14 November 2005 @ 12:18 am
Cameron’s plan is different to National Service but is a good idea.
A large number of the teenage and other school-leaver unemployed have never done anything to benefit someone else. If we can create a society in which people realise that their effort can achieve something, then we will create a better society.
Now, to me, that sounds a lot more like social engineering than I am comfortable with. Isn’t is ironic that Cameron is more right wing than a Tory (me) who genuinely prefers Davis’ policies!
I wouldn’t defend the emotional and exciteable way tabloids write, but the basis of their content is often just and is the basis for support of Blair’s draconian anti-terrorism measures and the Tories’ sensible immigration policies. At the same time however, you seem to attack the Specatator on your blog which suggests that it is not the tone of the Tabloid’s writing so much as the content.
Mark Steyn and Rod Liddle’s articles, particularly are not Islamophobic so much as culturally honest representation of facts without reference to emotion.
Comment by Administrator — 14 November 2005 @ 7:30 am
Well, I didn’t intend to give the impression that tabloids and the Spectator are the same issue. The Spectator’s coverage of both the riots and the 7th July bombings was inaccurate, unbalanced and inflammatory. It was unbalanced because no Muslim appears to have been invited to give a perspective from within the community, giving the impression that the Muslim community is itself the problem. In this case, the fact that the youths involved in the riots (as pointed out by Theodore Dalrymple, in the Spectator, and by others) were irreligious delinquents and not jihadis and that similar pre-existing circumstances existed as did in Brixton before the riots (such as police harrassment) are common knowledge but either went above Liddle’s and Sookhdeo’s heads, or were conveniently ignored by them. I didn’t find them “honest” at all - the exact opposite, in fact.
Comment by Yusuf Smith — 15 November 2005 @ 10:56 pm