Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

Danny Kruger’s little book ’On Fraternity’ was an attempt to define the Cameron credo.  It placed the ’New Conservative’ blend of social responsibility and decentralisation within a wider Tory tradition.  Today the author has a spirited piece in the Financial Times, defending the coalition’s frenzied approach to instigating reform. All across government ministers are engaged in the type of ’grand schemes’ which Conservatives are generally thought to regard with scepticism.  Kruger’s argument is that their motivation is to restore rather than to build anew.  To a degree he probably has a point.  At Slugger Mick agrees that ’good old fashioned Tory values’ rather than ’neo-Whiggism’ is the order of the day. Vince Cable, whose candour with reporters posing as constituents has the government rocking this morning, prefers to use the term ’Maoist’.  That’s hardly a recommendation, even taking into consideration Cable’s socialist past. Some Tory cabinet m...

Vince Cable may have attracted acclaim for his musings on the economy, but I would suggest that constitutional issues are not his specialist subject. Addressing a fringe event, at his party’s annual conference, the Liberal Democrat Treasury Spokesman delivered doom laden remarks, predicting a ‘constitutional crisis’, should Conservatives win the next election, and speculating that David Cameron could preside over the demise of the Union. Yes indeed. The Tory apocalypse is imminent. Britain will first become a hermit state at the edge of the European Union, and then dissolve, because one centrist government takes the reins from another. We’ll return to Dr Cable’s conference remarks, as reported by the Press and Journal , a little later. But it’s worth noting that the source of the former Glasgow councillor’s anxiety was a recent trip to the Scottish Highlands. The ‘gathering storm’ of Scots’ independence is a notion, then, that Vincent conceived in tranquillity , relatively recen...