A CORONATION?

David Davis for Leader says it's time to give the David Cameron bandwagon a full inspection: We members want the chance to kick some tyres. Similar sentiments from the Fox-supporting Conservative Home.

Telegraph columnist Andrew Gimson (not-online yet, I think) makes yet another of his appeals on behalf of an allegedly opppressed minority:

Etonophobia is a vicious, narrow-minded prejudice which should have no place in a civilised country, even though men as well-educated as Harold Wilson and Gordon Brown have suffered from it.

I live near Eton, and yes, I admit it, I never miss an opportunity to try to run over masters and pupils whenever I see all those gowns fluttering along the pavement. [Editorial note: are they called masters and pupils, or do they use some esoteric Latin term instead?]

Timothy Garton-Ash - hardly your average, chip-on-the-shoulder outsider - thinks we're about to enter the age of Blair-Cameron consensus. Butskellism is back, only now it has a new name:

Camerairism also invites us to reflect on the resilience of the ruling classes. If Cameron gets the job, both major parties will - until Blair's promised departure - be run by upper middle-class public schoolboys, many of whose close advisers share similar backgrounds. Only in France do you have a comparable phenomenon, based on many of the same elements: a very elitist top end of the educational ladder, a metropolitan political culture, and, above all, a system of individually but not collectively removable inequalities, which allows the governing class constantly to replenish itself with new blood.

For all that modern-man-of-the-people stuff, Cameron is an authentic toff: a product of Eton and Oxford, self-deprecatingly explaining that he only belongs to the exclusive, socially conservative White's club in St James's because his father, a retired stockbroker, was chairman of it. Even his youthful experimentation with cannabis or cocaine, if that is what his professed "mistakes" comprised, fits this picture. His spliff, if spliff it was, was a toff spliff. That's the spliff with added ambition, like the one I recall a future foreign leader passing to me at a student party at Exeter College, Oxford, while canvassing my vote in an effort to be elected president of the Oxford Union debating society.

Not that things are that much better in the US, I suppose. Let's look at some of the possible contenders for '08: Mitt Romney, son of George; Jeb Bush, son of George;  Hillary, husband  wife of Bill. If Al Gore, son of Albert, doesn't run, his offspring will probably be around in 2024. Ain't democracy great?

Comments

[Parabellum]

"Hillary, husband of Bill..."

Heh.

[Clive]

Thanks, Parabellum. You know what? I stared at the Hillary line for a full minute before I realised what was wrong with it. I don't know if that tells you more about my eyesight or Hillary's character.