The Tory leader steals ideas from everyone. donald malcolm says it’s time he had some of his own |
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The Tories' third place in the Southall by-election was a political disaster. But what made it a personal disaster for the party leader was the decision to run their candidate Tony Lit under the tag 'David Cameron's Conservatives'.
The ill-fated call was not only hubris; it was the latest example of the political kleptomania which has characterised Cameron's leadership.
The idea of putting the leader's name on ballot papers was a straight steal from the Scottish Nationalists. In their elections in May, Scottish voters were invited by the SNP to put a cross alongside 'Alex Salmond for First Minister.'
Salmond is now in power (if only just) and Cameron is interested in any idea, wherever it may come from, which offers a road to power.
Of course, the Tories' biggest role model
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| David Cameron is interested in any idea, wherever it comes from, if it offers the chance of power |
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has been Tony Blair and the New Labour project. Back in May, Shadow Chancellor George Osborne even claimed that the Tories were 'Blair's heirs'.
Osborne and other top Tories have acknowledged their debt to Blair's polling guru, Philip Gould, whose book The Unfinished Revolution details how the Labour Party changed itself before the 1997 election victory. They clearly absorbed Gould's lessons on the importance of image and language and the need for an opposition to eliminate the negatives and close down areas of attack.
Less well known is the Tory debt to - wait for it - George Bush. Not, of course, the beleaguered lame-duck Bush of today but the pre-2000 Bush who showed his party how to regain power after Bill Clinton's eight years in the White House.
Bush dubbed himself a 'compassionate conservative' and George Osborne, who attended the Republican Convention where Bush was selected, recalled that the message from George Bush "was that the 
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