It will not have escaped the notice of our regular readers that I have shown a somewhat less than charitable attitude towards the leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron. I think the time has come to provide some reasons for my hostility.

I realise that some people (maybe Cameron supporters among them) would dismiss my onslaught as the product of a crotchety, pessimistic and intolerant personality. Well, as a matter of fact, I am crotchety, pessimistic and intolerant but I have what I consider to be very good reasons for singling out David Cameron as the particular object of my animosity.

I also want to make it clear that I am not hostile to Cameron because he is not a libertarian. I do not expect Conservatives to be libertarians hence they are called ‘Conservatives’. Nor am I bitter about the fact that he is not a Conservative either. I expect very little from the current crop of moral and intellectual midgets that have aggregated in the Conservative Party and I am seldom disappointed.

Nor am I especially, or even moderately, outraged by his brazen careerism, his opportunism and his readiness not just to be cynical but to openly be seen to be cynical (e.g. peddling his eco-friendly bicycle to work, a few yards in front of the gas-guzzling limo bearing his briefcase). To this extent Mr. Cameron is probably no better or no worse than any of the other political jobbists who have infested our public realm like a colony of plague bacteria in the lymph node of a 14th Century peasant and from where they can, and do, distribute their pathogens around the national bloodstream.

No, my antipathy towards Cameron (which is really an expression of my fear of Cameron) is based entirely around the twin facts of his current status and this particular moment in history which combine to create (for want of a better term) a clear and present danger in two serious respects:

1. The current incumbents are devils all right but they are, at least, the devils we know. Furthermore, they are now tired, shop worn, wounded and semi-clapped out devils whose appetite for human flesh may not now be what it once was. The Cameronites, on the other hand, are a bunch of hungry, zesty, eager young devils who have publicly committed themselves to perpetuating the policies of the current government only they will have a fresh, newly-mandated set of legs with which to run with them. Thus, a Cameron government will inflict all the same predations that we currently endure under Blair, only amplified.

2. The commanding heights of our culture and public life are still controlled by the left. It is a control that, one day, may be wrested from them but not in time I think. It is for this reason that our narrative is shot through with contemptible lies.

For example, Nulabor stormed to power in 1997 largely on the back of public alarm about the fate of the National Health Service. By 1997, the settled opinion was that the poor old health service had been the victim of savage Thatcherite spending cuts which had brought that much-loved institution to its knees.

Well, that’s politics for you but truth is a quite distinct commodity and the truth is that the Tories did not ever cut spending on the NHS. In fact, the last time any government cut public spending on the health service was way back in 1976 (and that was a Labour government to boot). Since then, state spending on the NHS had been increased in real terms every year, including every single year of Thatcher’s premiership.

But, every single year, the BBC and others went to considerable lengths to ensure that everyone blamed the state of the NHS on ‘selfish Tory spending cuts’ (a complaint that was customarily accompanied by a hard case story of some war widow or cancer patient being turfed out of a hospital bed and onto the unforgiving streets to die). It was a lie that went unchallenged (or insufficiently challenged) and by 1997 it was a lie that had solidified into a settled national consensus. Indeed, it still is and it is largely for this reason that the Conservatives are associated in the public mind (quite wrongly) with hostility to the public sector and a preference for the market.

Similarly, it now appears to be the received wisdom that Tony Blair and Nulabour have been ‘seduced’ by ‘neoliberal economics’ and, as a result, they have unleashed the ‘rampant free market’ on us all. Never mind that even the humblest of private enterprises has been crippled by regulatory burdens and bled white with pernicious taxes. No, that’s all quite beside the point. No, everyone who is anyone is united in their opinion that somebody should rein in this irresponsible, unchecked, wild west-style, dog-eat-dog, every-man-for-himself, atomised, so-called free market culture (I have even seen kind of dog-shit in the Daily Telegraph, for chrissakes!).

So how does all this relate to the Bullingdon boy and his chums? Quite significantly. The Cameronites have made a crystal-clear promise to maintaining the tax-and-spend levels of the current government and have even suggested that they may well decide to crank them up further. Add that abuse to the profusion of ‘green’ restrictions which Cameron has also pledged to inflict and it won’t be too long before a mutilated economy finally collapses in an exhausted, anaemic heap.

And who will get the blame for all resultant chaos and pain? Certainly Cameron and the Tories will and that’s just ticketty-boo with me. But the trouble is that the turmoil will also be blamed on the alleged (and widely believed) Tory fealty to the “so-called free market” and so, as the Tory ship sinks like a scuttled frigate, it sucks our ideas down with it. That is the kind of damage that could set our cause back a generation or more (and we are struggling enough as it is). No, it is not fair or true but what have fairness or truth got to do with anything?

Of course, I would not be bothering to say any of this were it not for the fact that I honestly fear that Cameron is poised to win the next election and win it by a comfortable country mile. All the ducks (which is to say, all the ducks that matter) are lined up behind him and are noisily quacking their approval. Add to this that fact that the public is genuinely sick of the sight of Nulabour and it will not take much prodding, goading, lying, spinning or bamboozling to persuade them to elevate the only other man left standing into the No.1 spot.

In short, I can see the train hurtling towards the buffers and I feel powerless to stop it. Except that I can tell other people what I think is going to happen and why. Besides, if nothing else, it does go some way to explain why I am generally so crotchety, pessimistic and intolerant.