David Cameron

Now God knows I am not one of life's socialists but I do miss the proper old-fashioned lefties who were part of the political furniture when I was a lad. My first time at university there were plenty of rabid Marxists to argue with and I don't mean the pallid social-democrats who now pass for a left wing. Don't start me on Tony Blair (I resent being lied to about my country going to war) or Gordon Brown (abolished boom and bust my arse) but I am also in a state of despair about the right. Now I don't mean the nasty, racist scum bags of the BNP. I mean the Conservative Party.

When I was a lad the Conservative Party was a place for ideas about economic freedoms and libertarian ideals. Those ideas didn't always triumph over the old-fashioned paternalism but they did at least get an audience. Good politics is a battleground of ideas. Current bad politics is a banal spectacle of mediocrity, mud-slinging and mendacity. I heard that weasel Mandelson dissembling about university spending cuts at lunchtime. It's not the cuts I object to necessarily, it's the lying about them. And then I read of David Cameron's immoral soundbite that 'burglars leave their human rights at the door' and I despair about the sheer intellectual vacuity of it all. Cameron, I learn, is hoping to become the 19th Old Etonian Prime Minister. This probably shouldn't bother me but it does. After all that money spent on his education he really should know better than to spout drivel such as this.