![]() But the manner in which Boris declared himself in favour of Brexit on Sunday will never be forgiven by Cameron. In the past, breaches of the peace were quickly patched up by a text or a lunch. For a decade, they have maintained a truce, ruptured only occasionally. How apt that it should be Europe – the issue that always vexes the Tory party – that has torn the two men asunder. But his government quickly lost faith in the “ green crap” that drove up the price of fuel and almost triggered a tax rebellion in 2013. ![]() In opposition, Cameron urged voters to “go green, vote blue”. He claims to have inherited his father’s environmentalism, though it is not yet clear how far he would be willing to support tougher regulation of business as opposed to one-off ventures such as London’s “Boris bikes”. ![]() He was the mayor of all London, he insisted – but especially conscious, it seemed, of his voters in the Square Mile. Long before Cameron’s chancellor, George Osborne, cut the top rate of tax from 50p to 45p in 2012, Johnson was using his Monday Telegraph columns – the “weekly mind-fuck”, as they became known in No 10 – to pile pressure on the government to give the City a break. Johnson is a much more traditional Thatcherite, convinced that the best way to help the poor is to get off the backs of the wealth generators. What about the cornflakes nearer the bottom?Īs austerity bit deeper, Cameron insisted that “we are all in this together”, that the affluent should take care of the vulnerable and the indigent. In his Margaret Thatcher Lecture at the Centre for Policy Studies in 2013, he went much further: “Whatever you may think of the value of IQ tests, it is surely relevant to a conversation about equality that as many as 16% of our species have an IQ below 85 … The harder you shake the pack, the easier it will be for some cornflakes to get to the top.” This was risky language indeed from a politician who fancies himself a tribune of the people. ![]() In August 2008, the recently elected mayor called that particular idea “piffle”. Cameron aspires to mend the “broken society”. ![]()
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