Lacklustre leader yet to 'win over' nation

LONDON: On the whole, the British are suspicious of "charismatic" politicians, and it's unusual for someone to explode on to the scene with one brilliant rhetorical performance in the way Barack Obama did when his electrifying speech at the 2004 Democratic convention led to the White House.

Recently we've seen two exceptions: Nick Clegg changing the rules of the game with his appearance in the first televised debate last month and, before that, David Cameron seizing the Tory leadership with his bravura speech at the 2005 party conference.

Or were they such exceptions? Clegg-mania was for a moment so acute that the Liberal Democrats began to hope that they could overtake Labour in the popular vote, but it might always have been Cole Porter's "toy balloon that's fated soon to pop". So it proved on Thursday, when another balloon was punctured as well.

An election that was disappointing for all the parties was bitterest of all for the Tories. Whereas it would have been beyond the Lib Dems' wildest dreams to win more than 100 seats, the Tories had every reason to think they would win the election with a majority, rather than a plurality that leaves them bargaining and horse-trading.

What went wrong? Could it be that the British electorate saw through Dave?

In some ways he is a type perfectly familiar to those who recall the Tory party within living memory, when Sir Alec Douglas-Home's Cabinet in 1963 contained 11 Old Etonians.

But, nowadays, Cameron's background seems exotic: the handsome country home in Berkshire, the aristocratic connections, the prosperous stockbroker father who was chairman of White's, grandest of London clubs.

This is a little unfair. Though scarcely a meritocrat, Cameron is no brainless booby. After Eton he went to Oxford where he was a member of the Bullingdon Club, who dress up in tailcoats, get drunk and behave foolishly. But he also took a first in politics, philosophy and economics.

Once upon a time, such a man would have got an honest job, at the Bar, in business, or even journalism. But Cameron went straight "into politics", by joining the Conservative Research Department and working as a special adviser.

It was not a happy choice, since by September 1992 he found himself advising Norman Lamont, the Chancellor. On that indelible evening of Black Wednesday, when sterling was forced out of the exchange rate mechanism, the camera caught young Dave lurking behind Lamont as he made his humiliating statement, a photograph which he has been unable to suppress.

Then it was seven years in the nearest thing to a proper profession he ever came, as "director of corporate affairs" at Carlton Communications.

What that job title meant was that he was the PR spin doctor at a television company full of sharp elbows. Jeff Randall of The Daily Telegraph and Sky, sometime business editor of the BBC, is a bluff sort of bloke, and patently honest.

When he said, after his dealings with Cameron at Carlton, "I wouldn't trust him with my daughter's pocket money ... In my experience, he never gave a straight answer when dissemblance was a plausible alternative", it might be a warning.

Now Cameron enters No 10 without a clear mandate from the public and with a number of powerful and barely quiescent enemies in his ranks.

In the strange new landscape we have entered, anything might happen, even the final disintegration of the Tories, the oldest political party in Europe.

- INDEPENDENT