Poor Polly
Dear Polly Toynbee,
As a raving Leftie I’m sure your readers are used to your anti-Conservative rants. Bizarrely enough, I sensed that you were trying to offer some kind words of advice to the Conservatives in your column this morning, but even when you try to be nice your arguments simply don’t add up due to your frequent and often deliberate bias.
Like many other people, you completely misinterpreted George Osborne’s comments to suit your own purposes. All he was saying was that you don’t have to stop talking about immigration, taxes, etc when you start discussing more ‘recent’ topics such as the environment. This is a very sensible viewpoint and does not indicate any rift in the party whatsoever – but nice try. To suggest that Steve Hilton and Andy Coulson work against each other is ridiculous, seeing as Hilton works as a personal advisor whereas Coulson works on communications for the whole party. And then, as with other columnists, you desperately try to use the conflicting proposals from Cameron’s policy groups against him, but yet again this is a shallow argument. Is it really surprising that a pro-competitiveness policy group suggests expanding airports and an environmental group suggests halting their expansion? Of course not! It’s perfectly logical. The thing that annoys me is that I wanted these policy groups to report their findings in private rather than tell the public about them and cause complete confusion as to what they were trying to say (Zac Goldsmith being a prime example of poor message management), but having lots of different ideas on how to take the party forward is a good thing.
Some people like yourself want Cameron to keep modernising, whereas others want him to stick to the core conservative issues. Here’s my radical suggestion – do both. Talk about immigration, crime, taxes, the EU, the environment, the economy, society – talk about everything. Cameron needs to set out his views clearly and concisely to the public on a massive range of issues if he is to convince them he should be Prime Minister. Sorry Polly, but saying he should only stick to the centre ground is a foolhardy strategy and will cost him the next General Election, but maybe that’s why you suggested it?….
Yours truly,
A.Tory
Witanagemot Blogs
From the position of someone who was until recently thinking about changing over and voting tory let me tell you this…..i was going to vote tory until the infighting and divisions showed up.that was when i knew that all the policies that appealed to me from cameron would end up as unkept promises because half the party APPEARED to be against them. whether this is true or not is irrelevant it IS how it APPEARED.i don’t have time for fine print just an ordinary voter who works a lot of hours!!
I take your point. The infighting has made things difficult for David Cameron at times because some idiots in the party didn’t realise that we had to change in order to get into government, regardless of whether they liked the changes or not.