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Comments on: The apotheosis of Dave http://sharpener.johnband.org/2005/12/the-apotheosis-of-dave/ Trying to make a point Fri, 25 Jan 2008 12:21:35 +0000 hourly 1 By: Jonn http://sharpener.johnband.org/2005/12/the-apotheosis-of-dave/#comment-4254 Thu, 08 Dec 2005 20:20:12 +0000 http://www.thesharpener.net/?p=215#comment-4254 I think, depressingly, that what this says is that large chunks of the media were desperate to push for a Tory coronation at the last election… only they couldn’t because Howard was a) tainted, b) unelectable, and c) apparently utterly incapable of leading an election campaign without resorting to the “I’m not racist but” vote. As a result, noone in even the right-wing media could believe he was really going to do it and so they struggled to generate any enthusiasm. (The single exception as far as I can tell was William Rhys-Mogg who is, famously, wrong about everything.)

The impression you get from Cameron’s coronation – especially given that he was the one running that odious Tory campaign – is that this is the kind of enthusiasm with which a lot of the media has wanted to greet a Conservative leader for some tim – only the leaders the party had were embarrassingly bloody awful. It’s instructive that those bits of the media that haven’t been cheering on the new boy are the instinctively anti-Tory ones: the Guardian’s Wrap column reported yesterday that the honeymoon was over (after one day!), and Freedland reckons he’s the new Bush; the Newsnight info email today accused him of a u-turn; even the Times, still leaning more to Labour, called it a gamble.

It feels like this has been coming for a very long time… it’s just been obscured by the Tories managing to cock everything up pretty much consistently.

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