Ask Not What Lord Ashcroft Can Do For You...

Daveybloke, the Cuddly Conservative, has been imparting to the little folk what a wonderful journey we're all going to get when our domestic policy is being run by Lord Ashcroft and the Daily Mail and our foreign policy is being run in concord with Michal Kaminski and his chums. "No more harking back to bygone days", Daveybloke burbled, before quoting a particularly sanctimonious speech by the bygone American president who escalated the state terror in Vietnam to the full-blown and glorious crusade with which Operation Iraq Liberation is so often compared. "Let's make this the biggest call to arms the country has seen in a generation," Daveybloke burbled further, which in a more vacuous context might be seen as somewhat lacking in tact or else as slightly alarming, depending on whether one sees Daveybloke's Cuddly Conservatives as being mainly ridiculous, like George Osborne, or mainly unpleasant, like George Osborne. Daveybloke burbled that the party of William Hague and Chris Graybeing stands for the "idealists that the Liberal Democrats will inevitably disappoint because they cannot win this race" since, as everyone knows, the whole point of idealism is whether you win or not. Daveybloke burbled that it was time to inform New New Labour that it was not about you, the government, but about we, the people, and that it was time to say to rampant individualists that it was not about them, the individual, but about we, the people. Thus we, the people, will be asked (sic) to curb our rampant greed and retire earlier, on a purely voluntary basis, for the good of the country; while the Daveybloke administration will be cutting Big Government, National Insurance contributions and state pensions, on a purely voluntary basis, for the same noble purpose. Although Daveybloke does not intend to reform the voting system or to put the City on a leash or to indict any non-foreign war criminals or to stop throwing taxpayers' money at large corporations in return for worse services and higher bills, he does intend to permit voters to hold a referendum on any local issue if they can afford to mount a borough-wide campaign and get five per cent of the local population to sign up.