Sketch: Cameron gets Carter
Cameron wheels out Sir Michael Caine to prove his cred.
By Ian Dunt
The Tory conference centre for the election campaign is very nice. It’s not like the Lib Dem centre at all, where our bags were rummaged through and shady Lib Dem bouncers eyed us up and down on entry.
Instead, plates of bountiful fruit and trays of Innocent smoothies were laid out for us. Out the corner of my eyes, I spotted a sausage sandwich and wolfed it down. Much better. The room itself is more akin to a tiny art film premiere than a press conference. There were even cup holders for our Innocent smoothies. Baroness Warsi bounded up on stage. She has the marvellous quality of always appearing as if she was about to do the washing up. She delivered the Tories’ coup while barely containing her blustered pleasure. Sir Michael Caine was here.
Carter emerged from the back of the room with Call Me Dave, looking mildly bewildered and confused. That impression was confirmed when he later took to the podium to celebrate this brilliant “government” programme the Tories were so busy promoting. To his side, Dave, Warsi and shadow children’s secretary Michael Gove gazed at him with simmering discomfort. They wore smiles, which they duly cemented on their worried faces, but as a non-politician, and a confident one at that, he wandered constantly off-message, speaking with the kind of down-to-earth and opinionated language that can only damage a politician.
Gove strutted up to celebrate the ‘citizen service scheme’, in which the Tories seem to be suggesting that we can improve community cohesion by taking children to Wales so they can climb walls. Gove has a remarkable posture, like a rare bird. He reminds me somehow of the Dan Dare villain the Mekon. Dave was all shiny and confidence, although the more he does these things its clear he’s missing something inside, something important. He will have a hard time as prime minister, and my hunch is his honeymoon won’t last long.
As for the programme itself, Dave argued that getting kids from mixed backgrounds at the age of 16 and packing them off for a couple of months of activities and community service will solve many of our society’s problems. It’s basically a glorified Duke of Edinburgh award, but with added politics. As a supplement to a full social programme it’s good stuff, as a substitute it’s massively inadequate. The importance given to it today suggests it’s more the latter than the former.
The money is coming from the oft-derided Prevent programme. Dave branded it a social cohesion programme today. It is that, but it is also an anti-extremist programme. As it happens, it’s probably created more extremism than it’s prevented, so Dave is right to describe it as discredited. But there was no mention today of what would replace it. It’s possible the Tories are giving up on anti-extremism altogether.
Nice sausage sandwich though.
