Poll Dancing

Steve Hilton says the punters will be all over this one...

Another day, another disastrous poll for the man whose only apparent Prime Ministerial asset is that he isn’t Gordon Brown. Tim Montgomerie, a leading Christian, right-wing Tory blogger (and probably one of the most aggravating thorns in the side of the urbane, Notting Hill-mindset David Cameron) has pointed out that YouGov’s latest poll has the Tories back down to a worrying 4% lead over an exhausted, defeated Labour Party, led by a man who is widely regarded as being less popular than Nosferatu.

Under the circumstances, the fact that David Cameron’s Tory Party is not romping away with a 20% lead in the polls should be regarded with horror and consternation by everybody in the Tory Party and by everyone who, quite rightly, feels that the country cannot survive another term with Gordon Brown crippling the economy and ruining the country with ridiculous Tobin taxes, lunatic “carbon control” targets, scorched-earth “stick-it-to-the-Tories” policies and unprecedented incompetence.

It seems to me that the Tories are still frightened of being seen as all the things they were vilified for in the nineties. They are far too frightened to stick their collective head above the parapet on anything, no matter how trivial. They seem to be quite content to let Labour dictate the issues on which the election will be fought and they seem desperate to position themselves as far to the left as possible. On the NHS, taxes and general haemorrhaging of taxpayer money, they seem to be keen to position themselves as far to the left as possible, occasionally setting out a stall which is to the left even of the Labour Party.

In fact, I have on more than one occasion had the distinct feeling that the Tories actually do not want to win this election. They are so tepid about everything, so afraid of laying out what they want to do that it seems that they really have very little idea of what they will be doing.

And really, who would want to inherit the mess that Gordon Brown is going to leave on May 6? I sense that the only reason David Cameron is even trying as little as he is, is that he knows that if the Tories lose, they will almost certainly replace him with a new leader … if they survive a fourth consecutive defeat. So all he will get out of years of “rebuilding the Tory brand” will be an ignominious defeat and perhaps a footnote in history: the man who led the Tories to oblivion.

If that happens, what will the Labour Party do in their fourth glorious term? Will they concede the disastrous mess they have led us into? Or will Gordon Brown be so heartened at his unexpected victory that he will regard it as a vindication of his policies of borrow, tax and spend that he will not only flush the country away, but personally lead it around the U-bend and all the way to the slurry farm?

We have the curious situation in this country where the population know that things are terrible and that they can only get worse before they get better, yet the leaders of the two main political parties are away with the fairies, practically shoving each other out of the way to tell us how little they’re going to do to sort things out and then wondering why we don’t love them more.

Perhaps Gordon intends to finance the deficit with a pole-dancing club of his own, featuring Tessa Jowell, Vera Baird and Harriet Harman. If he manages to get us through the looking-glass far enough to pull off an election win, even that will be a possibility.

TJW is an itinerant blogger who lives in East Angular. He grew up as a fascist, mellowed into a Tory and was converted to anarchism in his middle age by the Devil's Kitchen.