Musashino Musings

This week appears to have been a good one for the Conservatives, with a successful conference and (at last) some good policy ideas being presented. The effect seems to have been to rattle Brown, which can't be a bad thing. Although Brown hasn't really done anything really terrible yet, and although he seems to be lot more sincere than Blair, there is something about him that I find quite unsettling. I get the feeling that underneath that dour exterior beats the heart of a red-blooded tyrant. I am sure that 5 years under Brown would be a catastrophe for the people of this country, with control-freakery running out of control. ID cards, the banning of immigration and more crippling taxes already on the horizon. Cameron, for all his public school toffery, seems at last to growing into the role of an opposition leader. To be frank, I've always considered him to be a washout as a leader, but finally he has stopped trying to out-Blair Blair and appears to be asserting his own Conservative credentials. And that seems to be having an effect, with Labour plunging significantly in the polls this week. The only puzzling thing is why everyone seems so surprised that a politician saying something he actually believes in rather than what he thinks "middle England" wants to hear has had such an impact on the British people. It's called integrity - a word we hasn't been associated with politics in this country for a very long time. This country needs leadership from the front, not policy driven by opinion polls and focus groups. Have we found such a leader in Cameron? Time will tell.