Cameron: conspirator or dupe?
The odds on Cameron resigning over Hackgate have narrowed.
Frankly, whether or not he does go is unlikely to be very heavily influenced either by Labour or what passes for the letwing media. Even so, every little helps, and it’s important for Labour to get its broad narrative right as the revelations continue to spill out.
The temptation will be for Labour to go for the Cameron jugular, setting out in ever increasing detail how Cameron and his inner circle (including Osborne) knew perfectly well what they were doing when them employed Coulson, how they’ve deliberately spread misinformation about who they met where and when, and how they’re desperate to see an end to the affairs so that Murdoch can continue on his no-longer-quite-so-merry-way towards total domination of the UK media. Labour’s sniffer dogs and rottweilers are chomping at the bit for a meaty piece of the action.
I’m not so sure that this is the right approach.
I’ve been out and about a lot over the weekend around Bickerstaffe and Skelmersdale, and people are well aware of the growing scandal. But the people I’ve spoken to are not very aware of the detail, and have no great desire to be. They just think it’s all bloody typical of the political/metropolitan classes.
Trying to pin Cameron on detail is therefore largely irrelevant to most people.
It’s also simply untrue to claim that Cameron is a knowing villain in all of this. People do know that the main phone hacking predated Cameron in office, and solely on that score he remains innocent in the eyes of the public at the moment.
The picture Labour does need to paint of Cameron is that of incompetent, upper class dupe, not least because it is true.
Cameron recruited Coulson to his inner circle – the only working class person to join it – because he didn’t know any better. Cameron met Murdoch dozens of times, even when he should have known better, because he didn’t know any better.
There is now a good respository of evidence to show that Cameron is unfit to govern Britain because his upper-class background means he simply doesn’t understand how things work. The latest one was his image of GPs at 1950s ‘Private Function’ dinner parties, but there is plenty more where that came from – thinking that his own constituency still has Council houses is just one more in the list.
The image Labour needs to create about Cameron and Coulson’s relationship is something like we see in a 1960s St Trinians’ movie, where the Cockney wide boy invades the upper class world with ’hilarious’ results.
Labour needs to attack Cameron not because he is the main villain of the piece – he isn’t. They should attack him because he’s an incompetent upper class tosser, unfit for the realities and complexities of modern government.
There’s not much in the way of evidence in this rather impressionistic post. Moreover, some of the assertions are contrary to the evidence that is well established. Cameron did know better about both Murdoch and Coulson. He was warned about Coulson repeatedly, and there was plenty of evidence of News International’s conduct, some of it established in the media and some in parliamentary inquiries. We can only speculate as to why Cameron chose to ignore the evidence of warnings, of the media, of inquiries, and of his own senses, but to suppose that he didn’t have that evidence is beyond speculation – it is fabulation. It is *not* “simply untrue to claim that Cameron is a knowing villain in all of this”, and it’s astonishing that you have chosen to make such a claim without having checked the relevant facts.
Btw, one possible explanation for his failure to act on the information he definitely is that he didn’t care. That is, there was nothing in News International’s behaviour that would have given him any reason for pause or alarm, as he would not have expected any of it to result in the kind of controversy that has now emerged. This certainly rings truer than the facile claim that he’s a nice-but-dim upper class character who doesn’t know how to run anything. Cameron is not lacking in shrewdness – he wouldn’t be where he is if he was. Nor, of course, does he lack the guile to present himself in whatever light will incline people to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Richard @1:
I don’t deny that there’s little evidence presented in this post. That’s because it’s a deliberately short post, focused on narrative rather than evidence.
However it links back to a much more detailed post ‘Understanding the New Conservatism’ which does set out more evidence. It should also link (and will link in the minds of those few people who read my stuff regularly) to another more recent longish post ‘Libya: class warfare and the New Conservative state’, in which I draw on a ‘statecraft’ models of how central goverment works/ed, developed by James Bulpitt, along with insights from Martin Smith/Rod Rhodes etc about resource dependency at the centre.
In these posts I provide some evidence to suggest that Cameron especially is not heir to Thatcher/Blair in the way he does government, but harks backs to an earlier high politics/low politics era, in which attention to domestic detail was unnecessary.
Yes, there is a little bit of supposition going on about what exactly is in Cameron’s head, and what exactly that is will be the work of historians in 20 years time, but I don’t think it ‘astonishing’ to interpret his overt (in)actions in a different light from the norm, and to see thme as guided by class-based arrogance, fused with the logics of his old boy networking, in a way which ends up creating difficulties for him in the realities of modern government.
I agree absolutely that Cameron has “the guile to present himself in whatever light will incline people to give him the benefit of the doubt.” He’s a smooth operator generally able to overcome little matters of detail e.g. the fact that plans for the NHS are unworkable.
But that’s what this post is about. It’s about the need to expose his lack of detailed understanding of the day, in a way which makes him an object of mockery. The evidence suggests he REALLY doesn’t get what other people get – to the extent that he has been astonishingly blase about his connections with Coulson, even in the face of the evidence presented to him, and on to the criminal underworld etc. Let’s make a point of that, because he is NOT, and is not likely to become, the central villain in the piece for most people – that accolade goes to those who actually ordered/did the phone-hacking. I checked that this weekend with people, a sort of rough and ready primary research for evidence if you like.