New Tory New Cameron: The Coronation of a Meeja Prince

With a mixture of horror and fascination I’ve been watching the progress of the Tory leadership contest and the steady but relentless progress of Cameron towards the crown, Cameron’s victory has been skilfully achieved and his use of the media almost Blairite in its discipline and cunning if one were particularly paranoid you might think that Alastair Campbell has been advising Cameron on the sly, but aside from such conspiratorial thoughts. Cameron is perhaps the purest expression of all that is wrong with contemporary Britain a perfect fusion of ruling class privilege alongside hypermodern media management techniques. Cameron’s Eton education alongside his experience working as a director at Carlton Communications do seem the perfect schooling for a modern political leader. Not to mention his extensive blue-blooded connections to the royal family and the wider aristocracy, as Private Eye noted the Tories really have decided that ‘oiks’ have had enough turns at the tiller and that the toffs deserved another go.

Cameron has through a friendly media and his own particular skills managed to keep his blue-blooded background out of the leadership contest, indeed very few people seem at all surprised that the leaders of both the Tories and Labour are both well groomed plausible public schoolboys, the more things change the more they remain the same when it comes to our political elites it seems. Cameron’s whole political playbook does seem lifted from Blair’s reshaping of the Labour party as has been evidenced by an extensive ‘rebranding’ exercise conducted by his team after the leadership victory. As in Blair’s presidential approach to leading the Labour party the Tories are to be relabelled ‘Cameron’s Conservatives’ a new more media friendly symbol of two blue squares overlapping has been devised. The Tories are to be reshaped in to Blue Labour, defiantly non-ideological and based on the appeal of Cameron’s personality and vaguely libertarian social mores. Cameron is also trying to put environmental themes back into the core of Tory policy making with the appointment of Zac Goldsmith realising that a Blue/Green coalition is as viable as a Red/Green one, and it provides a means of differentiating the Tories from Labour .

The question is: have the Tories selected a winner? Will Cameron have the ability to best Brown at the next election? I think the answer is a qualified maybe, all depending on how much Blairite ‘modernisation’ the more rabidly rightwing members of the party can take. There is also the question of how long Cameron’s media honeymoon lasts and of course those ever present ‘events’ that plague any politicians career. Cameron is however a big danger and any progressive should monitor his progress very carefully as beneath the media friendly veneer and post-ideological waffle lie the potential for implementing some extremely retrogressive policies. New Cameron New Danger!