Tuesday, October 03, 2006

DC won't wash-ington

I positively implore you to watch Armando Iannucci's thoroughly satisfying use of splice-and-dice that has Blair and Cameron dueting on David Bowie's 'Changes'. For once the playful editing shtick really works, and it's all the more telling that the montage is compiled from only two speeches, one by each leader, made within a week of each other. Singing from the same hymn sheet, as it were.

I'm actually less convinced of DC's ability to edge Brown off the centre ground this week than I was last week. Ending his speech with a rhetorical turn that included the phrase "let sunshine win the day" made him seem more like Barney the Purple Dinosaur than Benjamin Disraeli. If gravitas has an antonym, he managed to acquire it at that moment.

One thing's for sure, we're going to have a great new blood sport to play over the next two years: watching disaffected rightist Tories peel off as they realise that Cameroonian Conservatism won't necessarily get them into government. John O'Farrell once said that the most integral principle for Tory MPs is that of winning power, but there'll be a few 'send em back, lock em up, string em up' voices calling after Cameron before too long. This is the rousing finale to his conference speech:

"Let optimism beat pessimism, let sunshine win the day and let everyone know that the Conservative Party is ready - ready to serve, ready to fight, ready to win, ready to have a nice picnic on the lawn, ready to get our shopping from Fresh 'n' Wild, ready to sign up to become a Friend of Kew Gardens, ready to go for a family bike ride in the country, ready to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, and ready to inhale deeply, letting our lungs fill with hope and birdsong and sugar and baby kittens whose eyes haven't even opened yet..."

1 Comments:

Blogger John said...

He spaeketh with forked tongue in my mind.

Fact is, when Blair pulled the same trick in 1995, it was fresh, a new response to years of Tory failure and a release of frustration. Yes it was pandering the common man, yes it was inevitable that just by being not the staid Tories Blair was inevitbaly going to win, but damn it, even though we know now that it is all spin and pandering, you'd still have rather had it than Major, and it was original in British politics. DC is bleating (literally, his plummy drone voice is so annoying) exactly the same crap, and to assume that anyone would listen to a politician, a Tory politician no less, promise to priorities economics and public services equally with environmental concerns and be expected to believe that this sod has anything to offer other than his lust for power and desire to mimic Blair is frankly insulting. Oh you think Apartheid was a bit nasty? Well fucking done.

Hopefully Brown will be solid enough to expose this Emperor's new clothes motherfucker and his lack of policies before 2009.

11:36 AM  

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