...or is it?

Well, I watched the Peter Hitchens Dispatches programme on "Tory Toff" Cameron last night, and it wasn't as bad as I thought. So sorry, Peter, for writing you off as a low-grade moron last week before I'd actually watched it. (I'll also give you the benefit of the doubt that this troll blog isn't really you. Thanks for that, Van Patten!)

Hitchens's thesis is basically that Dave Cameron is an opportunist, a fraud. An opportunist because he has 'divorced his party from all forms of traditional Conservatism' in the belief that the Tories have to move to a 'centre ground' identified by PR people, focus groups and trendy journalists. A fraud for two reasons: first, because he doesn't believe any of this stuff - as is shown by his early policy pronouncements before becoming leader, which were decidedly right-wing. And second, because he portrays himself as a "man of the people" (via Webcameron, etc.) whilst in fact he is a 'Tory Toff' - an old Etonian who has more in common with Harold MacMillan than Margaret Thatcher or John Major.

Hitchens doesn't like this, partly because Cameron has betrayed small 'c' conservatism, but also because the lurch to the centre (or should we say the pile-up in the centre, given that the other major parties are in very similar political territory at the moment) is denying choice to the British electorate and means that huge swathes of the voters to the left, to the right, or in other ways outside the 'soggy centre' of politics are disenfranchised.

The "denial of choice" argument (which George Monbiot also appeared on the programme to support, from a very different part of the political spectrum) is certainly a worry. It's not a new observation - people used to complain about 'Butskellism' in the 1950s, for example, and the 'median voter' theory in political science suggests that the pile-up in the centre is an equilibrium feature of liberal democracies (because all parties pitch their policies at the 'median' or 'swing' voter). Peter Oborne made the same point in the 2005 documentary Why Politicians Can't Tell the Truth. But Hitchens is right: if anything the parties have become even more identical in their policy platforms since Cameron's ascendancy to the leadership. Hitchens doesn't offer much in the way of solutions to this political crisis, but maybe that's fair enough, given that this was a programme about Dave Cameron, not the crisis in British politics.

But the rest of the argument doesn't ring as true. So Cameron is an 'opportunist'. But can you really blame him, given the morale of the Tory party after 3 consecutive election defeats? Neither William Hague nor Michael Howard managed to forge an electoral breakthrough despite their commitment to a more right-of-centre approach. And the Tory party had every opportunity to elect David Davis, who did promise a more hardline strategy, in autumn 2005 but went with Cameron instead. In the same way that Labour MPs and party members have to accept some reponsibility for Tony Blair, the same is true for the Tories and Cameron. What is Hitchens's 'alternative strategy' for a Conservative victory? It's not made at all clear.

Equally, I'm not totally sure Cameron is a fraud - not now. It's entirely possible that he was toeing the party line with his previous pronouncements before he became leader, just to get into a position in which he could change things (Michael Gove made this point in the documentary). Or, he might have changed his views over time, as has Michael Portillo, for example. Or he might only have started thinking in the issues in earnest when he actually got to the leadership. That would mean he's an idiot but not necessarily a fraud.

And how much does it matter that Cameron is from Eton? There was some interesting stuff on the "A-List" for Tory candidate selection - Hitchens basically suggested that it was a front to get Cameron sympathisers selected for parliamentary constituencies. If true, that's pretty shocking. But on the other hand I never saw Cameron as trying to be some working class hero. This isn't William Hague with the baseball cap or John Major at the Happy Eater. It's well-structured politics, in the same way that Deal or No Deal is, arguably, well-structured television. You wouldn't want to watch Noel Edmonds for longer than it takes to change channels, and you probably wouldn't want to vote for Dave, but the whole thing is nicely put together and won't offend. It's for people like my wife's nan who says "That Tony Blair, he's a nice man." Still.

In any case, I think Hitchens represents the nasty cigarette butt of Tory politics. It's the grizzly Norman Tebbit knife-you-in-the-subway faction. A huge swathe of the Tory party was always in the soggy centre; Harold MacMillan, for example, would have slotted in to the right wing of the Labour party with no problems (as would Cameron.) Heath, post-1972, was similar. And, at a stretch, John Major (notwithstanding the rail privatisation disaster.) Maybe the Thatcherites are the hijackers and David Cameron is restoring the 'real' Tory party? Now there's a thought. And I think the Cameron revolution in the Tory party is fundamentally different from the Blair revolution in the Labour party, which really was about throwing away almost everything that was good about the party just to get elected.

Come to think of it, maybe the Hitchens programme wasn't that good after all.