It’s nearly over after four weeks of campaigning and that has been enough for us all. (How Americans survive 9/10 months I just don’t know.) So on Thursday it’s down to the polling station to cast our votes – then normal life until 10pm when the polls close. We vote old school here with bits of paper (no hanging chads for us) so the first results probably won’t come through until just after midnight. By 2pm enough results will have emerged for some sort of pattern to be identified but, if it’s too close to call we might not know until midday on Friday because a few constituencies in far flung parts don’t do a night count.
I’ll be voting Tory and, despite much of what is written about Cameron in the right wing US blogosphere I shall not be voting with a peg on my nose.
Forget UKIP. I know that some bloggers have latched onto them as the bearers of true conservatism – shows how little they know. I certainly agree with much of their anti EU sentiment and their harder line on immigration but policies alone do not a successful party make. You also have to have a measure of confidence in the leadership cadres and UKIP totally falls down on that. Tin foil hats, revolving eyeballs and bolts in the head tell you that you’re in a UKIP meeting – it really is the world of Buffy.
Probably the majority of Brits are sniffy about the EU – but it’s not high on their agendas. The Tories tried it as a major plank in their platform in 2001 and 2005 and it was not a game changer.
Forget also about Cameron’s admiration of Obama – this is standard boiler plate here in the UK where the Styrofoam columns are still erect and the political and media elite, with a few exceptions, are in a 2008 Hopey Changey time warp. It doesn’t mean Dave has gone all Frank Rich – it’s just empty rhetoric to please the gods of the BBC.
If I had my way I would probably have had a Tory party led either by shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague – a witty, shrewd, laid back Yorkshireman – or Mayor of London Boris Johnson – like Sarah Palin so far out of the political box that the normal rules of politics simply never apply. But we have David Cameron and I, like the Daily Mail, must confess he has begun to grow on me.
The Mail had its doubts about David Cameron sometimes wondering if he was another Clegg-like heir to Blair.
But over the years and with every week of this campaign he has grown in stature displaying serious minded conservative instincts and a tungsten determination to fulfil the Tories traditional function of clearing up the mess left by Labour.
He’s a man who believes firmly in a smaller state – indeed the only one of the three who sees virtue as well as pressing necessity in cutting public spending.
Meanwhile his commitments to the family (the stoutest defence against an overweening state) and to looking after the vulnerable shine through as genuinely as his belief in strong and independent institutions.
In his favour, too, he has shown huge energy, resilience and powers of leadership in uniting his party behind him.
Cameron is quite a complex character (Mick Brown had an interesting take on him in the Telegraph) and I don’t agree with everything he says – but a successful political party in an open, democratic society must always be a coalition of similar but not identical viewpoints and the modern Conservative Party, for all its “greening” and “caring”, is essentially Thatcherite in its commitment to small government and the protection of the family – and that’s good enough for me.
This is the last pre-election message from the bunker. Message #12 will be a comment on the results and will either be stained with the tears of despair or suffused with the spirit of ecstasy – such is the burden carried by the political junkie.
So, my friends spare a thought for this lost soul in the watches of the night (more specifically the early hours of Friday, GMT) as, slumped over the laptop, I measure my country’s fate accompanied only by my trusty bottle of gin…..
BTW…….waving my fist defiantly in the face of the gods of polling and punditry let me make my prediction now……A TORY WIN WITH A SMALL OVERALL MAJORITY…..excelsior!!!
