The election’s called, but Heffer still slams the Tories

By James Valentine

Simon Heffer, the Daily Telegraph’s leading columnist is notoriously ‘off message’ as a conservative commentator. Time and again we read his extremely candid advice about the Conservative Party and it’s clear that George Osborne is not his favourite.

Even so, I was surprised to see that, with the election called, and most supporters and commentators dividing along more partisan lines, Heffer’s language is harsher than ever. In a “plague on all your houses” piece he is predictably rude about Gordon Brown and Labour but the insults about the Conservative leadership have also lost none of their bite.

George Osborne is not merely weak; he “pretends he understands economics.” As for David Cameron, when he spoke to activists on the Embankment, “one was at once splashed in the face by the cold water of the obsession with image”. For good measure, he dismisses him as a “PR spiv.”

I don’t know the reason for Heffer’s bitterness. He is a grammar school boy and I surmise that he might have been patronised by the notoriously snobbish Cameroons. I have never met Cameron or Osborne but I know people who have, and they are said to be capable of being, at times, rather cool and offhand. Clearly, they’ve made enemies.

Tim Montgomerie of ConservativeHome recently expressed some frustration at the “blue on blue” attacks from the Tory press. But one must say, post-Blair and Campbell, do you blame the press or the politicians who have failed to square it?

Obviously it would be wrong to see this as a killer issue because most of the media are far more biased against Labour than the Tories. And in any case, the dead-tree press is less influential these days because newspaper circulation is dropping quite sharply.

But it’s remarkable how low conservative expectations are slipping. The normally astute Daniel Finklestein has written an odd piece comparing Cameron to Kinnock and concludes that the public won’t have the same doubts about Cameron as they did about Kinnock in 1992. This may well be true, but isn’t the comparison supposed to be with Tony Blair – doesn’t Cameron see himself in that league any more?

It’s all a sign of Cameron’s ineptitude and one of the reasons why, even under the most inauspicious circumstances, Labour is still in with a chance.