Stuart Reid

Did I watch the same speech?

What planet am I from? What have I been smoking? Matt and Fraser understand politics far better than I can ever hope to, but after reading their blogs I can scarcely believe we all witnessed the same event this afternoon. What I saw was a car crash, or at any rate an accident in a school playground.

On Monday, with George Osborne’s pledge on inheritance tax, the Tories had the metropolitan Guardian vote more or less in the bag, and for 24 hours they looked like possible winners. Today they look like losers again. David Cameron’s speech was a feat of memory but of nothing else. It was the same old, same old about the horrors of Europe and the horrors of human rights, and the beauties of our old friends freedom and choice. Plus, there was some feel-good stuff about the family as ‘the best welfare system of all’ (but hang on, let’s not be judgmental: ‘single mums do a brilliant job’).

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