Slick talk, then a flash of razor blade
WHAT a mobile phone salesman our slickhaired Prime Minister would have made. So smooth, he went on yesterday’s Marr Show to instruct us to vote for Brussels. The EU was a great network. This was a great deal. We’d never have such a great price quoted again.
Just sign here, voters – and be tied in to a swingeing contract for life.
You didn’t really want to believe a word alternative providers said, he informed us. Subtly scornful of rivals, he was keen for us not to read the proposed agreement’s minutiae. ‘We’re going to settle that later,’ he said about migrants’ benefits. They were going to be ‘phased in’, he said with a waft of the hand. ‘It’s a negotiation.’
Small print schmall print. Don’t worry your pretty eyes with that sort of thing. Trust me, I’m a politician.
And yet Mr Cameron’s main charge against the Leave lot was that they offered ‘a leap in the dark’. Behold the oldest law in politics: accuse your opponents of your own flaws. Almost the entire Marr Show was devoted to Europe. Ukip leader Nigel Farage was on immediately before Mr Cameron, saying the Remain case was ‘crackers’. I wonder how many European Commission interpreters understand that fine old word.
Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon was beamed in from Planet SNP, looking nicely sinister in a swivelling black chair. She wobbled her head and said she was pleased to be on Mr Cameron’s side. So is Jeremy Corbyn. So, good grief, are the owners of the big banks.
The show’s newspaper review had given us Labour MP Kate Hoey, who wants to leave, and BBC presenter Nick Robinson, there presumably to balance Miss Hoey even though BBC JOURNALISTS DO NOT LEAN TO EITHER SIDE.
Mr Robinson was showing rather a lot of cleavage with a low-buttoned shirt.
The Cameron interview was the programme’s main segment. ‘You must be knackered,’ said old Marr. ‘I had a decent night’s sleep,’ said the Great Salesman, before springing forward in his seat, looking Marr in the eyes and assuring him that ‘what I’ve achieved’ was enough to win the referendum.
That use of the first person was interesting. Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair both reached a point in their premierships when they pretty much went round the bend and started thinking they were inseparable from their office. ‘L’etat, c’est moi,’ as France’s Louis XIV is alleged to have said in a moment of Bourbon vainglory.
Mr Cameron repeated this tic later on when he claimed that ‘all 28 countries, including me’ would have to agree to new EU rules before they became binding.
And he laid it on thick towards the end when he spoke vauntingly of his six years’ experience as head of government. Some Conservative supporters, seeing their leader sing the praises of the EU, may wonder if Mr Cameron has been captured by an alien force, as sometimes happens to a goodie in episodes of Doctor Who.
But there was a startlingly acid little moment – it came when Mr Marr mentioned Boris Johnson – that may have shown us this was a Prime Minister prepared to fight nasty to save his skin.
He said that Boris (who at this point was still in his tent, Achilles-style) would find that ‘linking arms with Nigel Farage and George Galloway is a leap in the dark and wrong for our country’.
A sly slash of razor – a flash of blade – in the squeeze. It was an unnecessary stab which betrayed something ignoble in the Cameron character. Is he more frightened than he is letting on?
You could almost hear the Panic Klaxons hooting as he concluded that with ‘Putin to the East and Daesh to the South it is time to stick with your partners and your friends’. By which he means the likes of the socialist European Commission rather than the rank and file of the Conservative Party who placed him where he is. Rum, rum, rum.