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PMQs verdict: Butch David Cameron just had his “Mission Accomplished” moment

September 5, 2012 1:18 pm

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Every once in a while, a leader does something that is so palpably false that it becomes totemic of their leadership, it makes them a laughing stock, it calls their judgement into question and leaves a mark upon their record. The classic example is a George Bush’s speech in 2003, where a banner was displayed behind the former President’s head bearing the legend “Mission Accomplished”. The mission in Iraq quite clearly was not “accomplished”. It made him look triumphalist, ridiculous and divoirced from reality.

Today David Cameron had his “Mission Accomplished” moment. He stood up in the commons at PMQs and – with a straight face – described his government as “strong and united”. A nation guffawed. This could not be more wrong, the only question mark is whether the PM is oblivious, or whether he’s a shameless liar. Either way, strong and united governments don’t behave like this, and that’s just today’s example. For Cameron to say this after the Lords Reform revolt and Clegg’s boundary change tantrum defies belief.

Then again, perhaps the PM has a different concept of strength to the rest of us. The example of strength he used today was that he has kept George Osborne as Chancellor. Truly it is a mighty politician who displays his strength by retaining a failed and unpopular man to run the economy. By contrast, he suggested that Miliband was not butch enough (yes, butch) because he has been known to make coffee for people. I confess, dear reader, that I have been known to make coffee on occasion. I had no idea that to make coffee was a sign that I am not butch, and that lacking butchness (?) was detrimental to strength or leadership. The Prime Minister has certainly taught me something there…

Far better to show strength and be “butch” by rolling over and accepting IDS’s refusal to move on from DWP or by trying and failing to sack Ken Clarke and Sayeeda Warsi – instead inventing new cabinet roles for them. That’s butch Dave, you show them how butch you are Dave. Butchy Butch Butch.

And so as Cameron Butchly rifled through his notes as he sought the answers to Miliband’s probing questions (essentially “why have you not done anything much on the economy?” over and over again), he butchly failed to answer any questions, and butchly succumed to butch name calling and butch insults.

Mission accomplished Dave.

Butchly.

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  3. PMQs verdict: George Osborne defeats David Cameron
  4. PMQs verdict: David Cameron’s Mega-Shambles
  5. PMQs verdict: Miliband lets Cameron off the hook
  • http://twitter.com/LouMcCudden Louise McCudden

    Haha! 

  • http://twitter.com/Ceilidhann Kayleigh Anne

    Cameron’s sudden obsession with “butchness” (is that even a real word?) explains the decidedly male emphasis in his cabinet, particularly rich white straight men. Even by call-me-Dave’s standard of humour, which has always been sketchy, this is just odd. 

  • Ironknee

    A very weak attempt by Cameron, as you say it must rank as one of the most untrue  (and there are so many to chose from). Question time must becoming a time he dreads, he is now almost always a poor second best.

    I too have to confess to a lack of butchness, I quite often offer to make the wife a coffee while she mixes cement for the new drive.

    • http://twitter.com/mikedab Michael Barrow

      She should be using tarmac. I don’t know,  send a women to do a man’s job…

  • http://www.facebook.com/matthew.blott Matthew Blott

    Not seen it yet, will do when I get home – it sounds like a real treat! One word of caution to Mark Ferguson though – the Mission Accomplished looks ridiculous today but, despite W’s hubris, it wasn’t quite the same in 2003. Remember twelve months later Bush one a pretty convincing general election …

    • markfergusonuk

      It still seemed like hubris then though…

    • iamaspy

      “Bush one a pretty convincing general election …”He cheated to win that election via his brother the governor of Florida and his stooges in the Supreme Court.
      Hardly convincing.

      • markfergusonuk

        …erm…wrong election? You’re confusing 2000 and 2004

        • iamaspy

          Fair cop

      • http://www.facebook.com/matthew.blott Matthew Blott

        I was about to make the same correction as Mark but he’s beaten me to it. I also would not have said it was a convincing victory unless it was … convincing.

      • Brumanuensis

        Second time around local Republicans cheated in Ohio (allegedly).

    • http://twitter.com/RF_McCarthy Roger McCarthy

      This brings to mind an interesting New Republic piece by Walter Kirn about the bifurcated neurolinguistics of the current US election:

      ‘One reason their rivalry may try our patience is that the candidates
      speak such different languages that they seem to be talking past each
      other, like separate halves of one lobotomized brain. This is more than a
      breakdown of civil discourse; it’s a failure of mutual comprehension.
      Ideological divisions account for some of it—ours is an age of
      politicized everything, in which even chicken sandwiches cause
      controversy—but the breakdown is also a matter of linguistics. Obama’s
      poetry and Romney’s prose arise from disparate intellectual faculties
      and address incompatible sensibilities. When the president tried, with
      figurative rhetoric and multidimensional moral reasoning, to demonstrate
      that building a business requires a sturdy social platform, legions of
      linear thinkers took offense. When Romney asserted, flatly and
      reflexively, that “corporations are people” because, presumably, they’re
      composed of people, his insufficiently nuanced metaphor caused
      sophisticates to snicker. For those who process speech with the wrong
      lobe, the president expressed himself too fancily, his challenger too
      literally, and both statements seemed tone deaf in a way. No wonder
      there have been so many gaffes: Between the candidates’ clashing
      stylistic instincts and the electorate’s partitioned brain, utterances
      that seem succinct to one camp strike the other as nonsensical’.

      http://www.tnr.com/article/magazine/politics/106465/opposite-nature-romney-obama-campaigns-more-interesting

      And Bush’s stunt like so his whole presidential career can only be understood in these terms – to us latte-sipping liberals it was ludicrously hubristic but to those who only use the Right hemisphere of their brains it was a moving tribute to the armed forces and assertion of patriotic strength and unity.

      The same applies equally to Thatcher’s ‘Rejoice’ and Cameron’s barely coded mutterings about pathetic girly men who make coffee – we can no more ‘get’ these messages with our left-wired brains than they can get anything we say with their right-wired ones.

      And once you realise this and that to be political is in Carl Schmitt’s formulation nothing more or less than to divide the world into friends and enemies (something the right do as a matter of basic instinct) and act accordingly everything falls into place.

  • http://twitter.com/bencobley Ben Cobley

    Except for this little exchange, PMQs was deathly dull, lacking in imagination and ideas. I found it dispiriting to switch on and watch it after the summer we’ve been having.

    • http://twitter.com/shibleylondon Dr Shibley Rahman

      Perceptive Ben. I think the substance of the answers is dire. A positive thing which might be true, however, for me is that it seems to convey the distinct nature of the cultures of the organisations (I don’t know how representative Dave is of his, or Ed is of his, either.)

  • http://twitter.com/mikedab Michael Barrow

    Like Ed Balls, my boss makes me a coffee every morning too.
    I think all bosses should make their staff coffee every morning.

    • Alexwilliamz

      Depends how good they are at making coffee. It could of course be a defence strategy as your boss distrusts anyone else in case they slip something unpleasant into his cuppa. Beware the cappuccino he may offer you…..

  • http://twitter.com/RF_McCarthy Roger McCarthy

    Actually the refusal to make coffee for anyone else is one of the most basic means by which alpha males assert their dominance in the  modern office.

    In fact looking back over my own career my scrupulous insistence on doing my fair share of tea and coffee rounds – and worse my invariably helping to clear up the cups after a meeting when there were women around to do the job – probably explains my never having really been considered ‘management material’.

    And Cameron is addressing not the nation (virtually none of whom are silly or idle enough to watch PMQs) but his own party which is composed precisely of such alpha males and the beta and would-be alpha females who so desperately want to be admitted to their circle and to whom such things are indeed the everyday signifiers of privilege and power.

    • http://twitter.com/mikedab Michael Barrow

      Do you think Ed Balls makes anyone coffee? He looks a bit alpha to me.

    • http://www.facebook.com/people/Mike-Homfray/510980099 Mike Homfray

      I think we have really suffered from the dominance of Alpha males. I’m proudly beta, if not gamma, and really think we could do with a lot less in the way of macho strutting

    • aracataca

      Oh, don’t make excuses for him.

      Cameron made himself look a complete twerp.

  • Hamish Dewar

    Butchery?

  • Pingback: Butch | Malcolm Redfellow’s Home Service

  • Paul Stretch

    surprising how close the U and I keys are together, it’s an easy typo to make.

  • AlanGiles

    For most of my working life we had tea ladies. we rarely drunk coffee. Indeed when I was starting out about the only non-perculated coffee you could get was a bottle of essence called “Camp” – (it’s true, believe me!). It wouldn’t have been very butch to be seen with a bottle of Camp.

    • Daniel Speight

       I had an uncle who used to drink that. I seem to remember it was pretty vile;-)

      • Chris Cheetham

         I used it to make nice coffee cake – now how “unbutch” is that?

      • http://www.facebook.com/people/Mike-Homfray/510980099 Mike Homfray

        Its great to use in cold milk as iced coffee, though

    • http://twitter.com/waterwards dave stone

      “wouldn’t have been very butch ”

      I was more or less brought up on Camp coffee, and must confess to owning a pink shirt.

      But you could be thinking of the wrong sort of camp. The picture on the label of the bottle (it contained a dark liquid) featured a soldier, on campaign in front of a tent,  being served a cup of coffee by a Sikh waiter.

      • rekrab

        And after wards you done the “Butcher Dance”  Ya “Butcher”  left leg in, left leg out’ then shake it all about.

  • Daniel Speight

    Is butch a gay term? I’m never sure on these things.

    • Alexwilliamz

      Not sure, either, ducky!

      • Daniel Speight

         Thanks I’m sure, Alex.

    • AlanGiles

       It was certainly a word very heavily used in  the groundbreaking comedy series “Round The Horne” (1965-68) where each week Julian and Sandy would discuss their friends as in: “Jock. He was all big and butch, and made documentaries about  lumberjacking, mining, and shipbuilding. Lived in that little pink cottage. Friend of Gordon’s”

      (Not THAT Gordon, this was 45 years ago remember!)

      • Daniel Speight

         Alan first Camp Coffee and now ‘Round the Horne’, they will have to start a new oldies section on LL soon ;-)

        • AlanGiles

           Good morning Daniel: I am even ancient enough to remember the forerunner to RTH – “Beyond our Ken”  :-)

          Camp coffee really was diabolical – it looked like Hills Balsam Cough Mixture, Syrup of Figs or Daddies Sauce – and tasted worse than all three.

        • Brumanuensis

          Eh, eh, Daniel. I’m a big fan and I don’t consider myself an oldie just yet. 

          Alan, re. your ‘not that Gordon’, you’ve reminded me about how my mother constantly calls Gordon Brown, ‘George Brown’. I don’t know why she keeps confusing the two, as there’s nothing other than their surnames to link them – that and serving in Labour governments.

          • AlanGiles

             Talking of mums getting names wrong, there was a lovely story in, I think, Jon Sopel’s Blair book, when, Rhoderi Morgan introduced his elderly mum to the Dear Leader: ” I know you – you’re that Lionel Blair!” she said…….

            That’s why Tone preferred Alun Michael.

          • postageincluded

            Hard to imagine Gordon falling drunk into the gutter out of an official car.

    • postageincluded

      It was a strictly gay term, but it came out of the closet as a result of Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick’s gay skit “Julian and Sandy” in 60s radio show “Round the Horne”. It tends to be used now just to mean “ostentatiously masculine in appearance”, but it had a  more specific meaning then referring to sexual preference. You didn’t have look masculine to be butch.

      Whether word was used at Eton I don’t know but I can’t help wondering if Cameron was trying say that Miliband was Balls’ passive partner, which is pretty offensive. But then that’s Dave for you. 

  • http://twitter.com/Colchester1648 David Hough

    Nice Mark, although I’m not sure how butch it is to leave the b out of succumb lol

  • http://twitter.com/shibleylondon Dr Shibley Rahman

    Wonderful blogpost, Mark.

    It’s really whetted (sic?) my appetite to watch footage of what exactly happened this lunchtime. I was watching it remotely on various Twitter accounts at midday, and I must say I have never witnessed this degree of people hating this set of PMQs. A number of “worst ever PMQs” appear every week on my timeline, possibly due to a sampling error of the left-wing nature of my following/follower, but this week it was really bad: I was struck by a tweet by Toby Helm, and it is usually very mild-mannered in any criticism.

    These PMQs are significant for various reasons. Not least of course, this Coalition is totally not united – I remember growing up in the late 80s/early 90s, where the disunited Tory Party under Margaret Thatcher clearly heralded the demise of that particular administration. I think also significant is the rank hypocrisy – atune to ‘what you see is not what you get’. Further, as I am sure will be discussed elsewhere, it confirms in the public mind that this is a Government which has simply ‘lost the plot’ – ‘out of touch’ etc.

    It’s also been commented that Ed’s performance was particularly strong. Suzanne Moore on Twitter pointedly asked ‘Where is Ed Miliband?’, ironically before this happened at lunchtime today. In the long term, the ‘game plan’ for Cameron is clearly that he wishes to be seen to be taking ‘all the tough decisions’ (yadda). Therefore George Osborne’s full capacity becomes a ‘badge of honour’ amongst a paralympic audience. Exactly the same thing happened with the Thatcher administration – where Thatcher selectively and systematically virtually every sector of society, in my personal view. 

    The problem for this particular gameplan for Labour, I feel, is if Cameron gets somehow vindicated. If for example there is a rapid spurt of growth next year, for whatever reason, it’ll be dead easy for Cameron to argue that he made ‘the tough decisions necessary’ on behalf of the country, and he stuck to his guns. Hence there’s no plan B. This way, he gets to boost the reputation of his buddy Osborne, and gets to discredit Ed Balls. I suspect if the economy is still in managed decline on May 8 2015, there won’t be a cigarette paper in the two parties’ popularity about economic management. However, if the Conservatives plan is indeed working, Labour could be in massive trouble.

  • markfergusonuk

    That’ll teach me for typing so quickly

    • http://twitter.com/shibleylondon Dr Shibley Rahman

      Mark’s a busy man – unlike you Dave! #lol

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Graeme-Hancocks/1156294498 Graeme Hancocks

    Cameron was pathetic.

  • postageincluded

    “Butchness” isn’t a word, Mark. I think you mean “butchery”.

  • http://twitter.com/bencobley Ben Cobley

    An interesting point about cultures of organisations. It’s a bit like politics in general, and PMQs as its ‘pinnacle’ (for want of a better word) can’t help falling down into lowest common denominator territory. In the case of the here and now this constitutes an airless debate on who is least bad at managing the economy (something that in today’s world is largely beyond the powers of single governments). Zzzz…

    • http://twitter.com/shibleylondon Dr Shibley Rahman

      Couldn’t agree more – the material’s got very predictable, the jokes too. It looks like two people just ‘going through the motions’, but in actuality couldn’t give a stuff.

  • Brumanuensis

    I think what this PMQs has proven is that PMQs is actively damaging the reputation of Parliament. Rather than coming up with a single session of questions that won’t elicit answers, so much as exchanges of insults, Bercow should just ask the Prime Minister to come into the Commons on a regular basis for an extended period to answer questions on a particular topic. It’s notable that the urgent question sessions, such as the one on Jeremy Hunt, have proved for more enlightening than any bout of PMQs.

  • Winston_from_the_Ministry

    Are you sure?

    Sheds a new light on George Cassidy.

    • postageincluded

      Trouble with slang is that it’s ephemeral, local, and rarely recorded. I think “butch” meant “like a butcher” in Cassidy’s time. The gay use is prob post-WW2. I can vouch for the usage in the 70s because I was there – though as a teenage radical I was pious enough not to use it myself, at least when the Lesbian section of IMG were in the room

      Partridge’s slang dictionary gives “butcher” and “bitch” as old pub slang for king and queen on a card deck, btw, so “butch” meaning “male” could originate there. I’d imagine these would be usful terms at public school.

  • Winston_from_the_Ministry

    It’s in the dictionary, erego…

    • postageincluded

      It may be in the dictionary but it isn’t as funny as butchery….

      except in expressions like “Does His Butchness want cream in his coffee, this morning” or “That was a delicious lasagne, Your Butchness”.

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