Presenting David Cameron in Goodnight Sweetheart
It was an unpleasant coincidence that on the day Christopher Hitchens died, David Cameron gave a speech heralding Britain as Christian nation, placing religion at the heart of nation life. Like so many Conservative politicians before him, the Prime Minister makes speeches about a nation he wishes existed and not the one he governs. For all the affectations of modernity – his purported love of pop music and his wife’s trips to Ikea – he is as in love with a vision of an idealised ‘50s Britain as John Major was.
Major memorably painted a cosy image of Britain (though what he really meant was England) in 1993: “Fifty years on from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pool fillers.” He went on to quote George Orwell’s 1941 essay The Lion and the Unicorn with its image of “old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist”.
Cameron also wishes he could preserve an Enid Blyton Britain in aspic. In his speech today, marking the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, he said: “We are a Christian country and we should not be afraid to say so.” The poor, oppressed Christian trope is a familiar one from interminable 5Live debates and one being peddled by Rick Perry in his odious pursuit of the Republican nomination in the US. He opens his most recent ad declaring: “I’m not ashamed to say I’m a Christian…” Who is really afraid to say they’re a Christian in the US or the UK? No one in their right mind.
Cameron went on to list “responsibility, hard work, charity, compassion, humility, self-sacrifice, love, pride in working for the common good and honouring the social obligations we have to one another, to our families and our communities” as Christian values. While he was kind enough to note that people of other faiths and no faith at all can live by strong moral codes, he hammered away his point that renewing the sense of Britain as a Christian nation was vital to arrest what he calls “a slow-motion moral collapse”.
The fundamental problem with Cameron lecturing on morality is that he was effectively raised in a bubble of privilege and has floated in it for his entire life. Ed Miliband is no better. Both men are products of privilege. Cameron from the springboard of Eton and Oxford and Miliband thanks to his father’s high reputation in the Labour movement which helped grease the wheels for him.
While Cameron isn’t literally a lizard as Charlie Brooker insisted and David Icke sincerely believes, he may as well be an entirely different species to the rest of us. No matter how many reports he reads on the summer’s riots, he will never understand the roots of disenchantment on poor estates or the anger that will simmer again as unemployment rises. Those feelings are things other people have, almost alien concepts to a man to whom the bleakness of This Is England ‘88 probably seems like an exercise in mad alternative history. He doesn’t remember the 1980s being like that!
Christopher Hitchens had Cameron pegged perfectly: “He seems content-free to me. Never had a job, except in PR, and it shows. People ask, ‘What do you think of him?’ and my answer is: ‘He doesn’t make me think’.” Lectures from Cameron and other members of the cabinet like priggish over-grown prefect Michael Gove are just baffling sound, furniture instruction manuals read aloud by Martians.
I suspect the Prime Minister’s dreams are like some tedious new series of Goodnight Sweetheart with him standing in for Nicholas Lyndhurst. He stumbles through a door at the back of the shop and finds himself in a nice, simple world where everyone holds doors, bows to their betters and has the Vicar over for tea. The messy complexities of modern Britain with all those different opinions to deal with are just a bit too much for him. Scary, isn’t it?
