Wednesday 11 June 2008

Nanny Dave, I Presume

Well, it had to happen. Crazy Cameron, despite surging ahead in the polls, has made a mistake. In making comments on the need for Gordon Brown-Trousers to take a holiday, he's crossed the line and become just one more example of the Nanny State.

He's quite right, of course. You only have to look at the Prime Minister to see how badly he's managing. Long gone is the almost helium-inflated strutting of his final days as Chancellor, when, suffused with arrogance, his toes barely touched the floor. Gone, too, is the grim but earnest Gordon Brown-Trousers of the national disasters immediately following his ascent to the highest office in the land.

In their place is a cringing, haggard man who is terrified of each new disaster. He knows it's all gone badly wrong, that there is now virtually no chance of his party remaining in office, or returning to office for another 20 years or so, and that it's all his doing. Had he not bottled out of that election, he'd have been safe for at least another five years, and he knows that too.

The stress is definitely beginning to show, and Gordon Brown-Trousers does not look well at all. No matter how strenuously Number 10 might protest that he takes his family duties very seriously, there is only one of him (I dearly hope!) and, no matter how hard he tries, he can only be in one place at once. Pretty soon, something will have to give.

In all of this, Crazy Cameron is absolutely correct. Where he has gone wrong is to make a political point with this insight - if, indeed, you can call something so blatantly obvious an insight. Yes, it's very clever. It portrays him as a concerned, dutiful, public servant, and also casts Gordon Brown-Trousers in a very bad light - an obsessed, micromanaging, disaster-ridden workaholic who's so hassled can't even think straight.

The trouble is that it also makes Crazy Cameron look like an interfering busy-body. Gordon Brown-Trousers' health is absolutely none of Cameron's business, anymore than the Government - any Government - has any right to tell smokers that they must not indulge in their fave pastime. I very much hope this meddling is just a glitch, a diversion and not an indication that Crazy Cameron is the kind of politician that thinks he knows what's good for us, and then sets about making it law.

If he is, and this is a taste of things to come, individual freedom will quickly become even more of a historical relic than it already is.

Billy Seggars.

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