There’s little comfort to be found on Cameron’s woolly centre ground

‘It’s a brand new year’, Mr Cameron told his Oxford audience last Saturday as he launched his election campaign.

‘It’s a brand new year’, Mr Cameron told his Oxford audience last Saturday as he launched his election campaign. Why, so it is. He also has a ‘new politics’ on offer — new, new, new — but without a coherent philosophy, Tory or any other, to underpin it; no Disraeli, or Balfour, or Thatcher he.

Indeed, at a time when many of Britain’s institutions have been debauched during Labour’s period in office, when the nation has largely lost its sense of moral and political direction, and when citizenship of an increasingly identity-less country signifies less than at any time in its history, the feebleness of the Tory response is astounding.