Tory Genius 2. This time it’s personal.

I’ll be quick, what with my age and blood sugar problems.

I’m going to put Real World comments just after the bits that make me want to reach for my culture club…There’s a serious analysis at the end if you’re interested, but I’m all light-headed at the moment, what with Labour doing something halfway decent for the second time in a mere four years…

This from the Times.

David Cameron tells party that NHS is key to victory at the polls.

Francis Elliott, Deputy Political Editor.

David Cameron is to make the NHS a key campaign theme in an attempt to convince voters that the Conservatives share their priorities.

Gordon Brown is to make the protection of grammar schools against further comprehensivisation a key campaign theme in an attempt to convince voters that Labour shares their priorities.

In a private briefing to shadow ministers yesterday, the Tory leader set out how he planned to build momentum towards victory in the general election.

Success in the European and council polls in June was a must, Mr Cameron told his frontbench team in a pep talk at the Commons. Stephen Gilbert, his campaign chief, revealed that the party had set a target of winning 43 per cent of the vote in both elections.

Say just about what the general polls say most of the time (talk about aiming high!) now that Mister Brown’s been rumbled as having put the Christmas Club money on a whippet called Bubble. Poor Bubble.

But while such an outcome would help to boost confidence, the party faced a serious challenge convincing voters that it was not out of touch, Mr Cameron said. He showed shadow ministers polling that suggested a gulf between voters’ own priorities and what they believe the Conservatives care most about.

Those old polls, eh? Pray, do tell.

In a warning to hardline Eurosceptic MPs, he pointed out that most people do not rank Europe among the ten most important issues. The NHS and education remain key concerns.

So the wise thing to do here is obviously:

A) Ignore and then insult and outrage the very people who’ll be stuffing the envelopes and manning the phones and driving the old dears to the polling station on Election Day; you know, those…What was that word? Ah, ‘Conservatives’, I think.

B) Concentrate on the one hand on one topic that if any conservative mentions it outside the privacy of his own silk-sheeted boudoir (complete with handcuff-equipped head board and flogging post for the privately-educated and collection of Biggles novels for the last surviving grammar school boy), then everyone in Britain over the age of six will immediately accuse the Tories of promoting cannibalism on the Intensive Care Ward and prompt the BBC and Channel Four to run 24-hour telethons showing American ambulances stopping to drop black gunshot victims in the gutter once the paramedic’s phoned the victim’s credit card rating through to the dispatcher.

C) Concentrate on the other hand on a topic for which your entire cure involves Carol Vorderman (pbuh).

Now look, David. Carol Vorderman can cure lots of things, including a problem of mine which I choose not to elaborate now before my reading millions, but…

The whole of the teaching profession (bar about twelve individuals and the tiny private sector) plus all the local education authorities and all the universities [except maybe Buckingham] would rather die than do anything conservative up to and including saying something nice about Britain since the Old Stone Age – and even then the people here weren’t vegetarians so that’s touch and go too – and you think someone who can do Sudoku in the bath in ink is going to change the cultural Marxist stranglehold on our school children’s’ minds?

Can we just pause a moment and think about that?

OK, thought about it. Back to politics.

Senior strategists have been dismayed at recent polling evidence showing a dramatic slide in the Tories’ ratings as the party best placed to run the NHS.

Senior strategists have been dismayed at recent polling evidence showing a dramatic slide in Labour’s ratings as the party best placed to run the Quorn Hunt.

Where once it led Labour on the issue,..

Would that be when the whole economy went south or when the anti-Tony-Blair-war fuss was at its height, I wonder? I forget. Happy days, but now long gone, I fear.

… it now trails by about 8 per cent, according to the last Populus poll for The Times.

“His main message was that we should be doing better on health,” one senior Conservative said. Another reported: “He said we needed to do more to reassure people that we had changed and that we weren’t threatening the public sector.”

So that whole idea of having different parties in this country suggesting different visions of the good life is where, exactly, in all this?

Mr Cameron said that entrenching the Conservatives as the party of economic competence was a key priority.

‘Economic competence’ here meaning national spending levels equivalent to the Royal Navy in a foreign port on New Year’s Eve with a year and a half’s pay in cash in every man’s pocket – that kind of ‘economic competence’, huh?

But showing that it could best tackle the recession did not mean abandoning efforts to convince voters that the party had changed, he said.

Although the Tories maintain a pledge to match Labour spending on health and schools until 2011, the downturn led Mr Cameron and George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, to ditch a commitment to equal public spending overall last year.

So it’s a bad thing to spend less than Labour and we promise only to start doing so in two years’ time, right?

Say, I think I’m getting the hang of this entrenching the Conservatives as the party of economic competence thing already.

Mr Cameron said last week that the Tories must accept a share of the blame for the “cosy economic consensus” that allowed debt to rise to unsustainable levels.

‘Yeah, just what he said’ doesn’t make it any more.

The Conservative leader’s private presentation reveals that he expects that the political battleground will shift back on to public services in the months ahead as Labour accuses the party of preparing to slash spending.

You’re in a spot of bother here, aren’t you, David?

The pep talk to about 70 senior MPs and peers was given in the Boothroyd Room of Portcullis House. In his presentation on the June elections, Mr Gilbert said that the party was targeting the North West, Yorkshire and the Humber, Somerset and Cornwall.

A Conservative spokeswoman said: “We do not comment on leaks of private meetings.”

Meanwhile, a Guardian/ICM poll shows the Conservatives maintaining a 12-point lead over Labour. The two parties are unchanged on 42 per cent and 30 per cent, with the Liberal Democrats up 2 points on 20 per cent.

And this is the problem. The culture war problem. The propaganda problem. The party political problem.

If you spend your whole career as leader trying to get the other kids to like you by joining in their games and by not being too rude about their Transformers and Thundercats but kind of hinting that maybe your He-Man dolls might be a bit better and also telling the whole schoolyard that you’re not too different from those nice Lib Dems with their Power Rangers and you do manage to take some of their friends away from them because your Castle Grayskull’s, like, totally awesome, then when your pals’ voices start to break and action figures lose their allure and maybe some of the lads start to look meaningfully at the lasses what do you do?

You’ve invested so much time and drawn limited praise from your command of the Masters of the Universe worlds that nobody believes you’re really interested in or up to the grown-up stuff.

But now it’s time for the grown-up stuff, and his culture’s all wrong. And the best things in life aren’t free, it seems, and someone’s spent all of our pocket money for us and…

David Cameron, George Osborne and all are Political Class through and through, which means that they can’t think of; can’t contemplate let alone deliver a smaller and more efficient State.

It’s just not in them to do so; they can no more wish for and seek limited government as beloved of both libertarians and Old Right, than the Puritans of the Civil War period could understand and desire sustainable development, or the Vikings a centralized Welfare State.

Wrong minds. Wrong world.

So a barnstorming piece like this from Camilla Cavendish of The Times just won’t compute.

“We have spent an extra £90 billion on the health service, the third-biggest employer in the world after the Red Army and Indian Railways. We have Third World maternity wards, elderly patients discharged with malnutrition, lower cancer and stroke survival rates than most of Europe and Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust, which has apparently allowed more than 400 people to die through sheer neglect.
Why? Not for lack of money. Not for want of teachers, doctors, nurses, therapists or radiographers. But because the law of diminishing returns kicks in particularly viciously in heavily unionised, bureaucratic, monopoly services.”

For Call Me Dave and his pals, the above just isn’t real. We’ve got to have high levels of public spending on services, especially health and education because, because… because that’s what “we needed to do more to reassure people that we had changed and that we weren’t threatening the public sector” means. That’s what the Political Class does, all the time. They can’t envision responsible, independent people shifting for themselves in life and seeking to run their own lives without massive, tax-funded public spending run and owned by government .

“But this does not just affect accountants. It also lets down the most vulnerable people. Take Baby P. He died not because Haringey Council had no money: he was visited 60 times by different agencies. He died because bureaucracy had grown to a point where no one took responsibility for him. This Government created safeguarding boards, children's trusts, Cafcass, Sure Starts, children's services departments, and required them to work together. This means that people are attending meetings rather than seeing families, ticking boxes rather than exercising judgment.”

No, sorry, still not getting it. If we allowed churches or private charities – the sort of charities that actually have to collect money to finance them rather than being given wedges of tax and thus become quangos – or even reduced the number of agencies and their duties and staffing then who knows what might happened to the children of the poor? They might die? In large numbers.

CMD & Co. live in the political world of broadsheet editorials and focus groups and policy conferences and TV interviews with their blinkered perspective.

Cutting childcare budgets must lead to genocide in their tunnel vision.

In chasing some mythical ‘middle ground’ in the focus groups and polls that they run they’re missing the majorities they need to win and govern.

40% of the working class voted for Mrs. Thatcher’s Tories in the 1980’s and a few stuck around whilst Mister Major blew the whole deal.

Mrs. Thatcher’s government weathered all kinds of storms because it connected, across party lines, with ambitions and hopes – and fears – of people across all party lines and across class lines.

Her administrations were scarcely lily-white and scandal-free, but until the federasts blew it on behalf of their home country of Europe, nothing could touch her:

# Not Western rearmament and small wars against the will of the USSR despite massive Soviet rearmament and worldwide ‘peace’ propaganda campaigns because the British people rightly feared the USSR.

# Not the sometimes vile private misbehavior of Tory politicians when the economy was freed up, growing, and ever-more prosperous because the British people rightly wanted to share in prosperity.

# Not the ever-shrill shrieking of the Leftist firmament about jobsandhealthandwomenandhousingandcuts when people were free to find jobs or start their own businesses and provide for their own health - or a least not abuse it by working in stinking old factories that ‘she’ shut down - and were buying or renting the much more readily available private housing.

All the sources Mister Cameron seeks his advice from are up there in their ivory towers, and would run screaming from what millions of voters would leave their homes and their UKIP membership, and BNP meetings and council and housing association homes to achieve at the polls if offered:

# A majority of the British people would like to leave the EU, though few of the Political Class does.

# A majority of the British people would like violent criminals locked up for longer, though few of the Political Class does.

# A majority of the British people would like cleaner hospitals, though few of the Political Class does to the extent they’d contemplate allowing the sacking of NHS trade union members being disciplined for unsanitary behaviour of poor cleaning work.

# A majority of the British people would like to limit immigration, though few of the Political Class does.

# A majority of the British people would like better discipline and recognizable subjects in schools, though few of the Political Class does.

# A majority of the British people would like a bigger share of what they earn for themselves and their families rather than the meat people-carriers and hoodie armies on the dole and on the sick.

Suggest any of that, and practically everyone whom Mister Cameron knows personally and professionally would be up in arms calling for his (humane) removal from office. All he has is the Political Class and their tunnel vision.

Which is why he comes up with the idea of freezing the BBC budget instead of selling off the Marxist filth-mongers to scrabble in the marketplace. Which is why he seeks help in maths from the adorable Ms. Vorderman instead of abolishing the LEAs and putting the rest of the education budget into parents’ vouchers and setting up examinations charities to run the O-Level and A-Levels on a you-can-fail basis.

Which is why this is so ‘important’ to him.

Conservatives in disarray over 'sooner or later' tax promise
Kenneth Clarke appeared to cast doubt on whether the Tories would deliver on their inheritance tax pledgConservative Party tax policy was in disarray last night after George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, was forced to contradict Kenneth Clarke over a flagship Tory promise to voters.

Big deal. We need a chain saw taking to the overspending on quality-of-live political correctness of quangos and fake charities and all the soppy, stupid, anti-wealth ‘health legislation’ and their sponsors and employees and the tax reductions to follow, and all the public will see on TV is ‘disarray’ or disunity.

Nobody outside of the circles of the Wise and the Good cared a hoot if Mrs. Thatcher’s ministers or ‘friends’ were cross with her, or if backbench Tory MPs were internalizing all kinds of organic and non-organic compounds and objects as long as she was delivering spendable prosperity, national security, and some sense of law and order.

If your political culture doesn’t let you connect with the nation and follow its dreams and morality, then all you have left...

…is political culture.

And the jelly it grows on.

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Coming soon. The answer.