You could have fried an egg on the PM’s upper lip
YOU could have fried an egg on David Cameron’s upper lip yesterday afternoon when he appeared in sunny Bristol. The PM was speaking in a rather peculiar building – an almost empty science park on the city’s outskirts, its round atrium area filled with party activists.
The space was uncomfortably hot and Mr Cameron was looking straight into a merciless, piercing, armpit-moistening sun. The prime ministerial upper lip was soon glistening. Attack of the sweats!
It was such a glorious bank holiday, why on earth did Tory high command not scrap their plans, strip down to shirts and chinos and campaign on the beach at Weston-super-Mare? They might at least have found some swing voters there.
But there is something clinical, immutable, rigid, unspontaneous so far about this Tory campaign. Well, all the parties’ campaigns, really. Strategists with precious plans have plotted every minute of every low-risk day and the politicians look more remote from the electors than ever.
Mr Cameron was appearing alongside George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, both of them in weekday suits. On some news-management grid many moons ago it had been decided that tax was to be the theme of the day. I suppose no one guessed it might be high-summerish weather. Bank holidays are usually washouts. And so tax remained the dish du jour.
The day was hailed as ‘Money Back Monday’ because it was the start of the financial year and the new, more generous tax allowances for the low-paid meant an extra £600 in people’s pockets.
MR CAMERON had spent the morning in Poole, Dorset (where veteran Lib Dem MP Annette Brooke is retiring) and apparently ate a hot dog while he was there. One of the reporters who had been on his campaign bus said he had met ‘at least two voters’.
He arrived at the Bristol and Bath Science Park at 4.40pm. As his battle bus approached the destination, one of his police bodyguards made plain his feelings by being spectacularly sick, poor soul. Perhaps the copper had been food taster for the hot dog. Everyone getting off the bus looked a bit green. The audience had been waiting for some time, broiling slowly in the building’s atrium.
What a soulless place it was, of antiseptic design with bleached wood and long, lifeless corridors. Vast windows. An airport-style exterior. We could have been anywhere in the world – the middle of Texas, the plains of central France, or at a yet-to-open business hotel in Bulgaria.
Bristol has a handful of seats, local Tory MPs being Chris Skidmore, Charlotte Leslie and Jack Lopresti. Might it not have made more sense to hold a rally underneath Clifton suspension bridge – somewhere that at least had a resonance with the city?
A tanned Mr Cameron dutifully made his prepared speech, saying that there was a ‘moral’ case for the Tories’ economic policies. Fetch that, Mr Archbishop of Canterbury. It was ‘frankly immoral to spend money like it grows on trees’.
He said he and the Tories would spend money on ‘your family, your future’ rather than on ‘bureaucracy or bloat or the latest crackpot Government scheme’. This innovative use of ‘bloat’ as a noun was repeated three times.
Don’t vote bloat. Maybe it should be their new slogan.
After ten minutes he let George Osborne make a speech. Eeek. George stepped into the glare and you have seldom seen a man look so deathly pale. Shades of the sepulchre on Easter morning.
A brief session of questions saw Mr Cameron being asked about recent Lib Dem eruptions – Nick Clegg calling Mr Osborne ‘a very dangerous man’ and Danny Alexander alleging that the Tories are not interested in helping the poor.
Mr Cameron said it was inevitable that ‘you’ll find the minor parties saying increasingly desperate things’. He was unfazed by ‘the odd noise-off from a deputy’.
Or should that be noise-off from an odd deputy?