I’ve blogged on this recently ( http://bit.ly/l1BHGj ) – but compared to Osborne, Cameron’s a veritable man of the people…see http://bit.ly/lqBX2p

The argument that Ed Miliband has a greater grip on what’s going on in “the real world” will be a hard one to sustain.

Despite being an old-Etonian, Cameron comes across as a pretty down-to-earth, common-sensical guy.

Ed M is the one people find odd, weird, wonky, nerdy etc.

As for your flow of stories – you risk fooling yourself with your own propaganda. No doubt you perceive Michael Gove as a bumbler.

But the Right (more correctly) recognize that he’s played a blinder during the past year…… he’s got more through in 12 months than most Education secs would hope to achieve in 12 years, and his enemies are being trounced.

@Flowerpower,

It isn’t about appearances. In this case Cameron had such a loose grasp of policy detail and repeatedly advertised it by going off on a ‘terminal patients’ non sequiter that it revealed he is uninterested in the issue. No amount of pretend common sense will change him from a man that isn’t interested in important things into one that knows important things in the facts of detail, only intellectual integrity and diligent reading and thought can. No Prime Minister can be expected to know everything about every detail of every policy of their government that ministers have drafted and departments are going through the works of implementing so Cameron can’t be attacked for that. But in this case, Cameron didn’t simply not know: he pretended he did know and then incorrectly stated the Opposition was wrong.

That wasn’t wisdom. That wasn’t common sense. It was the arrogance of ignorance.

“Of course last week I think one of them thought the best way forward was to come clean about how Labour rubbish was and how great the Tories’ plans are for everything.”

Other daft suggestions have included more photo op stunts, adopting decade-old triangluation to show how bleeding edge he is and some kind of increased aggression towards selected people. Let Miliband be Miliband! I mean… his own Miliband. Not the other Miliband. Or the other other one.

Anyway. I don’t want to be Deputy Downer, but just as people don’t pay attention to speeches unless they’re most important speeches of person’s life, so they’re not going to pay as much attention to a flow of stories without it being in the context of a leadership crisis. Not impossible therefore, but in order to get that media focus you would need a ready supply of amoral bastards to constantly harp on about how useless everyone except them is, but – and this is the clever bit – also to never really spell out what should be done instead, in case the realisation that they are in fact loons stops people valuing their critical thinking. And where would you find people like that, outside of every major newspaper’s opinion pages?

Richard @1: Absolutely, Osborne should be tarred with the same brush (that’s why I bracket him in the OP) I merely focus on Cameron here because he was doing PMQs.

FP @2: We’ll have to agree to disagree on how Cameron comes across. To peopel I knock about with, not many of political saddos like me, Cameron comes across as an arrogant, Eton tosser.

I don’t mention Gove here (though I accept I refer to one of his dept’s ‘initiatives’ in my 10month old piece above) because I don’t think you can equate him with the inner circle made up of Cameron, Osborne.Letwin and osme other Oxbridge adviser (they’re named in my linked piece, cant’ remember their names now).

Gove is part of the ideological rightist section of the overall government who are pushing through their stuff (as you suggest, pretty effectively, though with appalling consequences) under the noses of the ruling elite.

I don’t subscribe to the idea that Cameron himself is heir to Thatcher – he’s more of a throwback to a ‘high politics’ focused elite of the earlier part of the century who don’t actually concern themselves with social policy except at a theoretical level.

My later article, building on the stuff I sent out in the one I link to here, sets out this analysis, using Statecraft theory as the underpinning rather than the now more usual governance/managerial stuff, which I think is now less relevant than it was under NL. See http://thoughcowardsflinch.com/2011/03/22/libya-class-warfare-and-the-new-conservative-state/

For these reasons I think it’s a mistake for Labour to try and attack all ministers on the same grounds, and that the focus should be, as much as possible, on the fact that Cameron is letting his right wing thug ministers get away with stuff he should be ashamed of as a traditional High Tory at heart. This has worked to an extent with Lansley’s ‘demotion’, though only temporarily. In Gove’s case, it’s his rank rightwing know-it-all arrogance we should be attacking, not his incompetence (the cock-ups are a result of that arrogance, not the other way round)

Mason dixon Autistic @ 3

such a loose grasp of policy detail and repeatedly advertised it by going off on a ‘terminal patients’ non sequiter that it revealed he is uninterested in the issue.

It wasn’t a non-sequitur. The terminal illness category guarantees the full benefit irrespective of means for a period and allows for the benefit being continued on a means-tested basis thereafter.

Cameron was arguing that this meant that few (if any) people suffering from (or recently recovering from) cancer would find themselves starved of much needed resources.

Certainly not the 7000 people losing £94 a week that Ed M claimed.

As to the general point – this is exactly the sort of technicality that could and should be raised by MPs (of any party) at the detailed committee stage of the Bill.

Instead, Ed Miliband was using it as crude political cover for opposing the principle of the reform.

Paul @ 5

Cameron comes across as an arrogant, Eton tosser.

You only say that because you know he’s an Etonian. To most people, Osborne comes across as a heck of a lot more arrogant (and he isn’t an Etonian).

In terms of manner, style, culture, lifestyle etc. Cameron is barely distinguishable from Clegg. Or David Miliband, for that matter.

To peopel I knock about with, not many of political saddos like me, Cameron comes across as an arrogant, Eton tosser.

This is more or less exactly halfway between a Fundamental Heffer Error and a classic Pauline Kael.

@ 8 Tim J

“Fundamental Heffer Error”

There HAS to be a more formal name for that…

9 – It comes from an old Danny Finkelstein blog from years back

http://timesonline.typepad.com/comment/2008/02/a-new-political.html

Simon is confusing what he wishes were the case with what is actually the case

Flowerpower

“Cameron comes across as a pretty down-to-earth, common-sensical guy.”

Are you serious? The man looks liike his face is made from plastic – if he smiles the whole thing will crack up.
Where are his worry lines? where are his rough hands having done a single hard days work?

Crikey – you must be one of these bourgoisie sychophants who actually admires arseholes like Cameron.

Please get a life and stop admiring the most worthless people in society.

flowerpower

“But the Right (more correctly) recognize that he’s played a blinder during the past year…… he’s got more through in 12 months than most Education secs would hope to achieve in 12 years, and his enemies are being trounced.”

Oh no – that’s too much – you cannot seriously be suggesting that the rubber lipped fool who was clearly bullied at school is anything other than terse?

Maybe you have low standards – or maybe mine are too high?

…and ‘getting things through’ is not neccessarily a good sign – Stalin got ‘lots of things through’ – but it didn’t really work out for the people now did it?

Simple Simon @ 11:

“Where are his [Cameron's] worry lines? where are his rough hands having done a single hard days work”?

Not like Ed Milliband, eh. You don’t even have to look closely to see that he’s got rough hands, and a lined face, from years and years of honest manual labour as a – em – TV journalist and Labour party researcher, not to mention Oxford University and The LSE. You can tell from his rough and ready Doncaster accent that he comes from the ranks of working people. If you take a look at the contributors to Liberal Conspiracy you’ll see they’ve all got the same horny hands of toiling people.

Oh here we go.

You ‘ad a bag of gravel? LUXURY! We dreamt of bags o’ gravel!

What is the relevance?

Paul is right, Ed M has at last found an area to effectively attack Cameron. More please!

@Flowerpower,

No, Macmillan did their research diligently. Ed Miliband didn’t bring up the subject of terminal Cancer patients, but Cancer patients that will likely recover. You can go see for yourself. Cameron didn’t understand the question and kept repeatedly talking about definitions of terminal illness when it wasn’t the issue. It was not Miliband’s claim but the result of Macmillan looking at their own patients. There are two-hundred thousand people in the UK who have had a Cancer diagnosis for one year, so Macmillan’s estimate for seven-thousand affected is a conservative one.

Or to simplify the point Flowerpower: most Cancer patients are not terminal.

The fact that David Cameron said he was part of the “sharp elbowed middle class” shows just how out of touch he is. If I were one of the “sharp elbowed middle class” who started off with nothing and worked their way up, I’d be pissed off at a man who who was born with millions referring to himself as such.

” I’d be pissed off at a man who who was born with millions referring to himself as such”

Yes but Ed was born with millions too, and used clever schemes to avoid paying taxes on the inheritance too, so attacking Cameron for privilege will just blow up in his face. These fine degrees of riches seem obscure to most voters, they just see wealthy men of one kind or the other.

Cameron has no personal experience of financial hardship, having to work in order to survive, working overtime because you need to, rather than to kiss management arse. It would never occur to him that leaving work due to serious illness, cancer or whatever, means that you have neither the physical or emotional strength to keep going on a basic level, let alone returning within a fixed time frame. He has no idea that real people, in the real world flowerpower, have far more than just their illness and recovery to deal with. Life goes on with or without them, because it has to. No private specialist, therapist or long recouperative holiday to give you every chance of a good, swift recovery, no choice but to wait your turn, along with every other person diagnosed with one thing or another. The longer you wait, the greater the stress, the weaker you become, leaving you with a further reduced chance of getting back to work anytime soon. Cameron, Osbourne, Clegg and the rest of the privileged set running the country headlong into social and economic aparthied, are doing it because they believe that you must have a ruling elite, to keep the proles in their proper place. VIVA LA REVOLUTIONE! or, preferably, general election, 2012.

19:

“Cameron has no personal experience of financial hardship, having to work in order to survive, working overtime because you need to, rather than to kiss management arse”.

Yes, unlike Ed “when I were a lad we ad ter live in a shoebox” Miliband.

I think the point about the Milibands and especially Ed in particular at the moment having a privileged upbringing has some validity to it.

I think the real issue in regards to it is their acknowledgement of it to date and how it conflicts with their policies. I have not followed the Leader of the Opposition as much as I should have, because he’s just been plain dull. But the Prime Minister has presented some troubling contradictions. He and his wife are both millionaires with salaries that number in multiple hundreds of thousands a year; their household before the election was extremely well-off. I don’t mind Cameron pretending to be middle-class because I’m not really sure what that means, but on matters of benefits and the Welfare Reform bill I’m angry with his politics.

Despite his resources, he claimed DLA for his late-son Ivan, he said he filled out the form himself. He was abusing the principle of it not being a means-tested benefit to claim money that the Cameron household did not need. DLA is now going to be replaced with PIP, which in the cases of manual aids disadvantages the claimant: basically a manual wheelchair user is regarded as the same as a person who can walk and will lose their mobility claim completely.

The Prime Minister’s actions before and in government say something terrible: that his well-resourced household was entitled to one of the most important benefits, but a manual wheelchair-user with nothing to their name is not.

He should clarify his actions.

Other Labour politicians can attack Cameron as being out of touch but Miliband can’t, for all the reasons other people have listed above. To anyone struggling on a low wage, what’s the difference between Cameron’s millions and Ed’s million, or between Cameron’s social privileges and Ed’s being born into the intelligentsia with connections to the Labour Party elite from the day he was born?

Yes, some people find Cameron an annoying posh twit. Lots of others find Ed a weird nerd out of touch with the real world. If you turn this into a competition about who is most relatable, Ed is going to lose.

Why pick on just Cameron?

The coalition of millionaires: 23 of the 29 member of the new cabinet are worth more than £1m… and the Lib Dems are just as wealthy as the Tories
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/election/article-1280554/The-coalition-millionaires-23-29-member-new-cabinet-worth-1m–Lib-Dems-just-wealthy-Tories.html

Ed challenges Cameron on welfare cuts for cancer patients a couple of days after managing to ‘diagnose’ an Incapacity Benefit recipient as fit for work. Hypocrisy.

you cannot seriously be suggesting that the rubber lipped fool who was clearly bullied at school is anything other than terse?

Not only is he not terse, he’s positively verbose.

The fact that David Cameron said he was part of the “sharp elbowed middle class” shows just how out of touch he is.

It just shows how vanishingly small the upper class is. As the son of a stockbroker, DC can’t be anything other than upper-middle class.

By the way, although cameron lets the mask slip occasionally, he does use language in a very deliberate and clever way to make him look like he has the common touch – see here. http://bit.ly/elidN8 . It’s a very good trick…

Trofim@13and20, we are all aware that Ed comes from a comfortable background, he’s not exactly skint and he had the advantages of his political family connections. If he should become PM, we will doubtless hold him to account, as we now hold Cameron to account. And that’s the point you seem to be missing, Cameron is in the top job, he gets the flak. And let’s be honest, he is a pretty bad actor, the body language, the obvious effort to maintain his composure when confronted with hard facts that oppose his version of the story. He was unconvincing in the t.v. debates before the election, he has remained consistently unconvincing ever since. Tory Blair may swim in the same sharkpool as Cameron, but at least he could tell a decent lie and not get caught out until weeks, months or even years down the line. Our unelected PM is so arrogant, condescending and distant from the lives of the vast majority of people, he ca’nt even be bothered to try and understand them. Ed may have had better chances than most, but do you really believe that he learned nothing of social strife and deprivation from his father? Ed actually wants to help those less fortunate than himself, where as Cameron could’nt care less. He’s nothing more than a throwback to the yuppie era, a few sharp edges rubbed down, but essentially the same attitude. ME.ME.ME. and tough luck if you fall by the wayside, I’m far too busy climbing over the bodies to help. Fucking hell fire, Philip Davis, tory MP, has said in the commons that disabled jobseekers should be allowed to UNDERCUT ABLE- BODIED APPLICANTS by accepting less than the minimum wage. If that does’nt say it all about the tory attitude, what does? I’m watching the news while I write this.

The Tory spin machine are constantly fighting off the Flashman image because they know it’s one of weak areas. unrestrained he naturally slips back into the schoolground bully all too easily. You can the the boy out of Eton but you can’t take Eton out of the boy!

I’m indifferent to them all, but one thing I do know, is that the perceptions of lefties are usually out of step with those of ordinary people.

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23950116-tories-gain-three-points-in-poll.do

“The Conservatives gained three points in the latest opinion poll to stand just one point behind Labour, with David Cameron the only party leader whose popularity is moving in the right direction”.

Bloody ordinary people. No wonder socialists despise them.

Hold on though. Labour have not went after Cameron’s upbringing, not really. Whatever we say about Milliband and how relatively rich he is, the real question is, has his wealth meant that he has cut himself of from the rest of society? With Cameron and the Tories, the answer is pretty obvious; not only has it insulated them, but they make a point of pandering to the rich.

I wouldn’t say that Milliband’s wealth is an issue, IF he is still able to grasp the concept that having to struggle on low wages and how something like prolonged health problems can cause real hardship. If he can convince the electorate that he can understand that, then Cameron’s total lack of empathy is something Labour can exploit.

Jim @30, very simple reason why most of the media, most politicians and most of the population, when amongst strangers at least, have given Little Lord Fauntleroy a pretty easy ride on the personal front. They fear that focusing too strongly on him as David Cameron, the individual, will elicit a wave of sympathy for him, making they who criticise appear the villain of the piece. Picture the scene, some journalist or newsreader tears Cameron apart, getting a little bit personal and making judgements on his character, Cameron siezes the opportunity, makes a big show of being emotionally wounded, brings his family into it, if the one who upset him had’nt already done so, he drops all the right moves at the right time, leaving people with images of him as a family man, devoted, loving, caring. People are only human, they will subconciously think of his late son, transfer any sympathy they feel for Cameron to that image and attack the offending person with a salvo of venom. He may be devoid of sympathy for aynone but his own kind, but be in no doubt, poshboy has a good sense of the darker side of human thinking. Tell him that a playgroup had to close, due to funding cuts, he’ll say,”What a marvellous opportunity for the private sector, they can take it on, do it cheaper than the LA and the playgroup stays open”. Tell him that a playgroup for disabled children is closing, again because of the funding cuts, he will tell you that he knows how hard it is, his own personal experience, the same speech we heard before, during and since the election. Then he may pass you a buisiness card, reccommending a private sector firm that can ‘help you with this problem’. THEY are scared to attack, HE knows it. Stalemate.