Don’t take the voters for fools, Mr Cameron

David Cameron can give rousing, mature, insightful speeches. Yesterday’s was not one of them. It used the word ‘hope’ 7 times and ‘change’ 27 times and that, I suspect, was its entire purpose – because there was precious little content in it otherwise. In the News of the World today, I describe the speech as vapid nonsense. Here’s ten extracts which show why.

1. “It’s because we are progressives that we will protect the NHS…We recognise its special place in our society so we will not cut the NHS; we will improve it for everyone.” Come again? Refusing to cut the NHS reflects its ‘special place’? Herewith the poisoned logic of Brown: that love means never having to say ‘cut’. If you cut, you don’t care. If you care, you don’t cut. Since 1994, this has been Brown’s verbal snare – and I had hoped that Cameron would wriggle free from it.