Regular readers of my blog, yes I know you could all meet in a phone box, will remember that last summer in my blog "Cameron the Macc Lad" I suggested that the early sign's of Cameron's premiership hinted at a Prime Minister who would be found to be badly out of his depth when faced with a crisis. I don't want to be smug but remember where you read it first.
If "Things Can Only Get Better" was the Blair's chosen song then perhaps an apt song for Cameron would be U2's "Out of Control". Over the past year Cameron has given little impression of being in control of either his cabinet or the country he was elected to run. Cameron has looked well equipped on PR but ill equipped on savvy and judgement.
Here goes:
1. U turn on the sell-off of Forestry Commission land and even worse Cameron's failure to make an example of and sack Spelman, the idiotic minister behind this.
2. Lansley and the NHS
3. Libya - one thing you could usually credit any Conservative prime minister with was a hard-headed foreign policy. Not Cameron who wanted to Libya to be his "Sierra Leone", one of the most creditable and moral British interventions over the past ten years.
Some commentators may give Blair with very little but on Sierra Leone he got it very right. Cameron did not feel he could pass up on a similar opportunity on Libya and thought that Gaddaffi would nicely do a runner like Mubarak in Egypt. Cue lots of grateful Libyan's and great publicity for Dave. Except that as anyone who ever knew anything about Libya could tell you, such as Tory boy, fellow blogger and all round good bloke @piloti001, Gadaffi would not go quietly. Now we have a messy and expensive foreign policy intervention with no clear end game in sight.
4. News of the World - heralded Miliband's rebirth as Leader of the Opposition. Miliband ran rings around Cameron from the off, set the agenda whilst Cameron dithered, and gained everything he wanted - an enquiry, Brooks resignation and a dismantling of a large component of the right wing spin machine. Cameron was left humiliated and weakened both publically and within in his own party.
5. The riots - for the so-called party of law and order both Cameron and May looked not only badly out of control they seemed not even to know the country they lived in. Now both have managed to get themselves embroiled in a row with senior police officers, something neither Thatcher nor Blair would ever have allowed.
So in conclusion Cameron is a Prime Minster who has serious questions over his competency. He has shown himself to be politically inastute, unable to control his cabinet and slow to respond to or even understand a crisis.
