Will the Brits choose Labor’s Dracula over the Tories’ opportunistic wuss?

David Cameron, the ridiculously effete, wholly unprincipled, and thoroughly non-conservative leader of Britain’s Conservative Party (whom, I kid you not, David Frum has recommended to American conservatives as an exemplar of the type of conservatism they ought to adopt), has not sealed the deal with the British people, says Melanie Phillips. The reason, she explains, is that Cameron thinks the Tories are out of power because they are not leftist enough, and he stands for absolutely nothing.

Here’s an example Phillips gives of conservative leadership, Cameron-style: he solemnly declared that the Lisbon Treaty would be lethal to British sovereignty and that Britain must have a referendum on it. Then he turned around and dropped the idea, his excuse being that since the treaty had been approved, his promise to hold a referendum had become moot. So he surrendered to something that he and his fellow Tory leaders had clearly said would destroy British sovereignty.

Against a laughable fop like this, Gordon “The Undead” Brown could lead Labor to another victory. And why not? Doesn’t the Undead One truly represent British political society as it now exists?

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LA writes:

A side note: “Lethal” has always been a favorite and overused word of Melanie Phillips’s, but lately she’s become positively addicted to it, using it in virtually every column and blog entry. In this column she uses it twice.

I’m particularly sensitive to her use of that word because in the first chapter of her 2006 book Londonistan she described the Muslim immigration into Britain of the mid-to-late 20th century as a “lethal” development. That, understandably, impressed me. But I was also, understandably, sorely let down when she failed in the rest of the book, or anywhere in her multitudinous writings on the Islam problem, to advocate the reduction of this “lethal” Muslim immigration by even one Muslim per year. Phillips’s frequent use of “lethal” thus serves as a reminder of what is for me the most interesting and exasperating thing about her: her intense emotional condemnation of the Islamization of Britain and Britain’s surrender to it, combined with her total failure to take any principled or practical position against it.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 04, 2010 01:50 PM | Send