I leaned my back up against an oak

The green Conservative tree has gone from this blog's sidebar, replaced by this one.

I leaned my back up against an oak
Thinking that he was a trusty tree
But first he bended, then he broke
And so did my false love to me. source

You'll remember Dave's hug-a-huskie, see-me-I'm-Modern phase, when he replaced the Tory torch with a nice tree. Well, a pretty sketch of a tree, anyway. But a tree. Solid things, trees. Very British. Constable country. Heart of Oak. That sort of thing. I like trees. A lot.

So I went along with it. 

Dave's watermelonish ecowankery grated, but once a Tory, always a Tory (stay with me, here). I've been a Conservative since I was in the sixth form, a hell of a long time. I remember Mac, just about. I hit political puberty when Wilson defeated Douglas-Home. I saw Heath and Thatcher come and go. The desperation of the après-Major near-death experience nearly overwhelmed me but here I still was when it became clear that Cameron was the best hope of getting Labour out of office (always an overriding consideration) and installing a Conservative government.

I knew the task ahead was Sisyphean. I knew that extraordinary positions would have to be adopted and accepted. That there would have to be compromise. That it would be a painful, rough ride.

But I went along with it.

I went along with it because I trusted that the core of Conservative values would remain uncompromised. I believed Cameron when he spoke at the 2009 conference which I attended, of promoting commerce and industry to create wealth in order to help the helpless. I believed him when he said he would stand up for marriage and the traditional family. After all, even bloody Toynbee (surely?) can see the overwhelmingly convincing evidence of its utility for the greatest good of the greatest number of individuals and therefore of the societies they live in. 

So I went along with it.

I believed Cameron when he said he would defend this country's liberties, culture and integrity, and to that end would put a stop to Labour's deliberate, malign policy of unlimited immigration (engineered by stealth and against the known wishes of the vast majority in this country) by which vast numbers of defiant and barely English-speaking trouble-makers, from cultures incompatible with ours, can arrive at our ports and immediately receive benefits for which the natives have to work a lifetime while quietly plotting to destroy our heritage and, oh, yes - kill us. I believed him when he said he would ensure that foreign murderers and rapists would be deported. I believed him when he said he would reign back rule by unelected foreign dictators with an agenda wholly inimical to the interests of this country. 

So I went along with it.

It almost worked. Against overwhelming odds, the Conservative party almost won the election. Cameron brought us back from near oblivion and into government. 

Coalition was unavoidable. But for true Conservatives, having our party shackled to the ever-venal, self-interested, Brussels-contaminated, socialist-lite, petty-dictators of the Illiberal Undemocrats has proved painful beyond measure. The rage in Conservative conversations, out of earshot of Portcullis House and Notting Hill, is unprintable. Not that the Party leadership gives a flying fuck about that.

Allowing that there are among them one (perhaps two) men (sic) of integrity and authentically Liberal character, the LibDem members of this coalition government are, like their party as a whole, a fractious, puffed up, self-righteous bunch of cynical hypocrites whose Liberal and Socialist wings can barely conceal their internecine snarling long enough to remember to call the Conservatives 'the enemy'. Yes, even Dave's friend Nick. This article nails the Liberal Democrats for what they are. 

(By the way, how courageous of you, Deputy Prime Minister, to make a head-on attack on the terrifically popular Daily Mail, with its highly political readership, just because it is the bête-noir of the currently LibDem-supporting Guardian-Brigstocke tendency.)

Clegg even talks of the Tories as his "enemies". Talk about smug. 

But who is surprised? This is the party whose official, documented election campaign policy is 'Say what the audience wants to hear'. Never truer than when addressing the leftwing mass of the party at the annual jamboree. All together now, follow the bouncing ball: 'Tories are ruthless bastards!'

Cameron sought to bind his enemies the LibDems to him for five years, to give him long enough in government to undo the worst of Brown's near-terminal damage (little did he know...) He thought that meant giving them real power: more power than in the wildest dreams which Clegg, Cable and Huhne dared dream. More than that unlovely gang asked for. So generous, Dave, so generous. Clegg and his historically unpopular, near-lunatic party were given power beyond their weight or their worth. 

Now, every day we get a LibDem announcement about how virtuous they are and what bastards the majority Conservatives are. How every good thing coming out of Whitehall is from the LibDem manifesto. How the Conservatives, with vastly more electoral support than they and vastly greater numbers of MPs, are being prevented from showing 'their true colours' by the nice LibDems. 

Such fucking, lying hubris. Who the fuck do they think they are?

Just look at the numbers. At the council elections in May they lost 700 seats and posted their worst result for 25 years. In their pursuit of their Holy Grail of voting reform, they lost by a margin of 2:1. Their poll ratings are in single figures, less than half the support they secured at the general election. Nick Clegg scores 12 per cent on the question of who would make the best PM.

In another poll, 63 per cent of people say they don't know what the Lib Dems stand for. At the last election, despite a brief bout of Cleggmania driven by the novelty of TV debates between the leaders, they actually lost seats. And to put all this in a historical context, they have not won a general election since the end of World War I. 

Don't they get it? After decades of boring the country rigid, they are, truly, deeply, madly unpopular. They couldn't win an election if they were running against Colonel Gaddafi and Osama Bin Laden - and they never will. 

The Liberal Democrats are abusing their position - daily, gleefully, mendaciously (it means they're liars). It is tasteless, undignified and an insult to the electorate.  

They prattle on about what a great job they are doing in government, about the sacrifices they are making, and, most of all, how they are civilising the Conservative barbarians making up the vast bulk of the coalition. 

This is armour-plated, ocean-going self-righteousness of awesome proportions. After 200 years on the ballot paper in one guise or another and after being the dominant political party of the 19th Century, they seem completely untroubled by the fact that only one person in ten now thinks they are fit to run the country.

And now, Cameron is Clegg's prisoner, and he is exhibiting all the signs of Stockholm Syndrome. His 'friendship' with Clegg is preventing him from being a Conservative and from governing as a Conservative, albeit in coalition. 

Worse, Cameron refuses to acknowledge, in any practical sense, Britain's increasingly vocal anger at government by Clegg's lodestone an unelected foreign dictatorship, the real-world cash-cost of which is finally coming home to even the thickest British citizen. You know, that bloke who can't even spell 'E-U'. 

These are two astronomical political failures as well as failures of government.

Cameron might as well not be a Conservative at all. He looks quite happy, for all the world like an Orange Booker, perfectly comfortable, for pragmatic purposes, to share a bed with the life-long socialist enemies of my party like Huhne and Cable, both of whom are actually damaging this country - Huhne to a catastrophic degree.

Is Cameron happy with this? Seriously? Does he think the Conservative Party at large is happy with this, or the millions who voted Conservative? 

Or is the realpolitik of his position such that he must say nothing, and allow this appalling state of affairs to continue, letting the Liberal Democrats shrewdly and assiduously build their bona fides with the BBC and enough voters ('We are a party of government again! Look at our record!') that, at the next general election, they will be in contention for enough swing votes to split the anti-Labour vote? 

By sleeping with my enemy, Cameron is doing almost all that is necessary to hand this country back to Gordon Brown's two most teeth-clenchingly loyal fixers, his accessories before during and after the fact of his ruination of the country's social fabric and economy, Ed Miliband and Ed Balls.

For that is what I can see coming at me from the other end of this long dark political tunnel. In the dark days ahead the electorate will vent its anger with the coalition government. If David Cameron does not change course, his successor in Number Ten will be Miliband. The Weird One. All he has to do is... nothing.

So, yes, my heart remains Conservative. But is my party with me? Are you, Mr Cameron? Daily I ask myself how much longer I can remain a member of the Cameroon Conservative Party.

And yet... God help us if Labour get back into government. That fear is the only thing keeping me on side. To leave the Tories now would give me huge, bitter satisfaction - and enliven this blog no end. But I can't. No, not because of you, Mr Cameron. Because of Ed Miliband and Ed Balls. A lipsmacking Up Yours, Dave, would turn to ashes in my mouth the moment I saw the Weird One on the news.  

It's autumn. The winds are starting to blow. That lovely Conservative tree is no longer green, no longer strong enough to lean on. The nights are drawing in. It's getting cold.