Cameron and the election's career-defining moment

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/01/david-cameron-election-career-defining-moment

Version 0 of 1.

It’s that moment in a relationship when you know it just isn’t going to work. You’ve pleaded, you’ve begged, you’ve promised to change. Not even flowers are making any difference. You’ve told your partner over and over again how deep your love is, but you’re getting nowhere. You’ve tried to prove that deep down you are passion unbridled. But your better half has heard it all before and is no longer impressed. The ending is just a matter of time.

All three party leaders now find themselves in that position. After months of campaigning, the country is still struggling to feel the love for any of them. The opinion polls have barely moved in months and it is David Cameron who is most feeling the strain. Dave had been so sure; his mates Lynton and Danny had convinced him that the smoothest-talking bastard always won in the end and that come the last week he’d have the voters eating out of his sweaty palms.

It was time for one last push. Having done marginally less poorly than Ed and Nick at the Question Time set-to the night before, Dave felt he was on a roll in front of a large crowd of Asda employees at one of the last of his staged PM ‘Meet the little people’ Direct in Leeds.

“Ask whatever you like, you feisty chaps and chapesses,” he said at the start. The last time he was in Leeds, he also referred to northerners as feisty. Healing the north-south divide – something he said he was passionately committed to – might sound more convincing if Dave could manage to stop himself being so patronising.

“Look,” he continued. “I know I’ve made mistakes. But I’ve learned from them and I promise to do better.”

It’s not you, it’s me.

“But this is a career-defining election ...” Cameron’s lip moistened as he realised his mistake and hurriedly tried to correct himself. “I mean, a country-defining election.”

It was too late, though. It wasn’t him, it was us. Cameron had revealed his true colours through a massive Freudian slip. Dave had just confirmed out loud the very reason why so many voters find him hard to trust. He isn’t in the job primarily to make the country better and heal north-south divides: he is what everyone most fears and dislikes. A career politician. A man, who apart from a few years working as a PR man for a TV station, has known no life outside the Westminster bubble. A man who quite possibly understands the concerns of ordinary people even less than those other career politicians, Ed and Nick.

While all this was kicking off downstairs, Sam Cam, looking uncannily like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, gazed impassively from the balcony. One of the advantages of being so posh is that she has learned to never let her face betray her emotions. Was she being adoring? Was she bored? It was impossible to tell. The only small giveaway was that she clapped the one questioner who didn’t throw Dave a simple lob, by asking why she was being forced to send her child to a free school she didn’t like rather than any of the five she had asked for and were a great deal closer. There again, quite a few people clapped that question so maybe she hadn’t been listening that closely and was only trying to be polite.

His upper lip got so wet with sweat, the longer the event went on, it was almost navigable. Unlike the questions. “Who would you like as deputy prime minister?”

“I want an absolute majority.” Dream on. But even if his dream did come true there was clearly no one in his party whom he could think of who was up to the job. From fantasy, we moved to amnesia. “People said the coalition wouldn’t last a year,” he said, forgetting it was primarily his introduction of a Fixed Term Parliaments Act that prevented it.

“What was your biggest mistake?” Trying to play hardball with Alex Salmond by not giving the Scots the opportunity to have a third choice of “Devo Max” in the referendum slipped his mind.

Still, Dave was right about one thing. All elections – and careers – have their defining moments. This might just have been his.