the no 10 handover has begun - and osborne s rivals have a target | simon jenkins /

Published at 2015-10-07 21:56:54

Home / Categories / Conservatives / the no 10 handover has begun - and osborne s rivals have a target | simon jenkins
David Cameron may want his friend to succeed him,but he and George Osborne now possess fairly separate agendasPower never works to rule. No leader should ever volunteer his or her termination in office. From the moment last summer that David Cameron announced he would resign before 2020, energy drained from his office. The Geiger counter over Downing Street fell silent. It crackled instead over George Osborne, or Theresa May and Boris Johnson. One of them is the future for every Tory in the land. Cameron’s “resignation” has turned his moment term into one long hustings. It was a terrible mistake. The leader’s conference speech in Manchester today was a classic.
Uncannily reminiscent of Tony Blair,Cameron offered a great candyfloss of cliche, an ebullience of waffle. He can smooth his way through any interview and bring any audience to its feet. Littered among the platitudes so derided by “the new politics” were some undoubted signature nuggets. An instinctive liberalism showed in references to social mobility, and the virtues of (some) migrants,prison reform, gender and race equality. The speech was unequivocally for homosexual marriage. Such passion against discrimination was strange in a Tory speech.
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Source: theguardian.com