The gay marriage trap

The shambling remnants of Britain’s social and moral conservative movement are marching to Stalingrad, singing as they go. They will not be coming back, but they don’t realise that yet.

David Cameron has cleverly provoked them into this suicide mission, by claiming to be a keen supporter of homosexual marriage. And so, with all the self-control of bluebottles massing round a dead cat, or squirrels besieging a bird-feeder, the Moral Minority have rushed to campaign against him.

The risk to them is great. The risk to Cameron is minor. Even if they succeeded, the Prime Minister would not mind much. Very probably, Cameron does not really support same-sex weddings at all, or even care about the subject. It is not clear that he cares about anything. His beliefs, if they can be called beliefs, cut in and out like a digital radio signal, depending on the circumstances.

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But he knows one big thing. Modern politicians define themselves by picking their enemies carefully, and by being noisily attacked by them. It works. New Labour, year after year, managed to fool parents into thinking it was going to reform state schools by arranging to have David ­Blunkett barracked by the teachers’ unions. And in what looks like the final stage of his Tory purge, Cameron really, really wants to be attacked angrily by preachy moral conservatives, whom he can and will dismiss as bigots. I suspect he daydreams of mowing down a doomed uphill charge led by Lord Carey, while Ben Summerskill of Stonewall looks on approvingly.

He thinks that loss is gain. That is why he hugged the hoodies, fell in love with the NHS and recanted his former (and correct) view that wind farms were little more than giant bird-blenders. At the start of the Cameron project, Oliver Letwin used to muse privately that the Tories might need to lose up to a quarter of their traditional supporters to gain the new ones they needed for a majority.