by Kevin Meagher
Is he a “man or mouse” asked Tory MP Tim Yeo of his own leader and Prime Minister a couple of weeks ago, questioning whether David Cameron has the cojones to press ahead with a third runway at Heathrow.
“Mouse” seems to be the answer judging by how our beleaguered PM is weakly responding to attacks from his own side at the moment – both real and surreal.
This weekend we were treated to the frankly bizarre tale of Zac Goldsmith, the maverick nimby Tory MP for leafy Richmond Park, openly plotting to inveigle Boris Johnson back into the House of Commons by threatening to resign his seat and trigger a by-election if David Cameron ends up supporting that third runway.
Then there’s the tale of Tory backbencher Bob Stewart who admits he was approached by a couple of fellow MPs this summer to act as a “stalking horse” challenger against the Prime Minister – a modern day Sir Anthony Meyer.
Perhaps most significantly is a report yesterday by Gary Gibbon, political editor of Channel Four News. He reckons there is a “grouping” of Tory MPs that regularly meets “in the office of a Tory former minister and privy councillor” with the aim of one of its number becoming a “challenger” to Cameron, perhaps after next May’s local elections.
What’s going wrong? The prime minister’s troops – and indeed his officer class – are lining up to attack him in a way that would have been utterly unthinkable under any previous Tory Leader. We have clearly come a long way since Lord Kilmuir intoned that “loyalty is the Conservative Party’s secret weapon”.
But loyal to what? There is no sense that Cameron has spawned an age of hegemony in the way Thatcher or Blair both did. By dabbling across the ideological divide – a support for gay marriage here, a bash the welfare scroungers there, David Cameron ends up trusted by no-one.
