You’ve got to hand it to Davey Cameron; he sure knows how to use the swivel-eyed loon brigade to his best advantage. And by dissing UKIP, he doesn’t even have to alienate his own swivel-eyed nutters.
“fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists, mostly”
Note the trendy allusion to Aliens there. That’s another target demographic sorted.
After being told of the comments, Mr Farage said he believed it was the Tory leader’s “inexperience as a politician that may account for why he stepped way over the line”.
Er, no, mate. It’s your own lack of experience that led you to falling for that honey trap and giving Cameron a day’s worth of free exposure. Bravo! Well done!
As an aside, wouldn’t it be nice in UKIP were to start apologising for all the unsubstantiated claims they’ve made over the past decade-and-a-bit? Feel free to make a start of it Mr Farage.
James,
I look at this the other way to you, Cameron has giving UKIP a day of free publicity, which is a far rarer experience for them.
Cameron’s handling of UKIP’s response to this comments is poor. Challenged to substantiate his remarks he hasn’t offered any substantiation at all and just says “it’s all been said before” which sounds a bit schoolboyish (“I called Jones nasty names but they were only the nasty names that all the other kids called him”).
Most people outside politics and media have no great axe against UKIP, so Cameron has made himself look nasty as well as insubstantial and there’s the impression he didn’t mean to say what he did, which makes him look like someone who makes mistakes under the slightest pressure (which exactly what Lib Dems in his part of Oxfordshire have told me).
There are plenty of grassroots Tories whose personal outlooks matches UKIP’s policy positions and some of them will take his “racist” attack on UKIP as an indirect slight on them a month before the local elections. Bravo to that!
Fair point, but I think he is getting far more out of this than UKIP. They may be getting their place in the sun, but Cameron is engaged with a far broader rebranding exercise which this is only helping.
That’s the ultimate question isn’t it. When Cameron dishes his own base or people similar to them which effect will be greater? The extent to which he appeals to non-Tory votes by sounding normal or the extent to which he alienates his base?
I don’t buy the West Wing view where the moderate Republican candidate can say one thing to appeal to his own voters then another to “steal 5 million Democrat votes” without each of those remarks having an equal and opposite reaction.
I’m told that the Conservatives’ utter collapse to practical extinction in Canada in the 1990s was preceded by them moving to the left in a very Cameronesque. Their voters stayed at home. Liberals voted for the real thing. Only with a neo-Con like Steve Harper in charge have they come back to (minority) government in Ottawa .
I don’t buy the West Wing view where the moderate Republican candidate can say one thing to appeal to his own voters then another to “steal 5 million Democrat votes†without each of those remarks having an equal and opposite reaction.
Why not? Labour have been getting away with that shit for years.
True, the right is a different creature and the rise of UKIP makes things more difficult for them (as we saw as recently as the 2004 Euro Elections) – but slagging off UKIP is pretty pain-free from Cameron’s POV.
None of that is to say that I think Cameron’s strategy is a guaranteed success. In fact, I think the wheels are already starting to come off, he hasn’t made the progress he needed to during his first 100 days and he is now struggling with an image of insubstantiality (the brilliance of the Guardian’s Chris Martin April Fool is that you could totally believe Cameron going for such a thing). I think his agenda to marginalise the far right has been a lot more successful than his agenda to co-opt the centre left though.