The shine comes off Cameron the unprincipled

After a honeymoon run, and on the verge of the beginning of the Brown premiership, it is becoming clear that the David Cameron remaking of the Conservative Party is no longer looking that attractive to voters.

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David Cameron, as you may recall, has been rebranding the Tories towards the centre, his top priorities being the NHS (as if that model isn't fundamentally flawed) and the environment - advocating taxes on aviation for example. Meanwhile, Gordon Brown increased tax on aviation, but also reduced the middle rate of income tax by 2% in his latest budget. Cameron has been unable to commit to tax cuts at all, terrified that he can't defend it on principle (how can you defend something when principles seem so easy to sell out) .

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None of this was helped by the grammar school debacle, with the party having two different policies in concert!

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Now Tory MP Quentin Davies has defected to Labour. I hardly approve of course, given his constituents voted for a Conservative MP - had they wanted Labour they would have voted Labour. Nevertheless, according to the BBC Davies made some very good points about Cameron:

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"Under your leadership the Conservative Party appears to me to have ceased collectively to believe in anything, or to stand for anything.... It has no bedrock. It exists on shifting sands. A sense of mission has been replaced by a PR agenda....Although you have many positive qualities you have three, superficiality, unreliability and an apparent lack of any clear convictions, which in my view ought to exclude you from the position of national leadership to which you aspire and which it is the presumed purpose of the Conservative Party to achieve"

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Indeed, although why Davies thinks Labour is any better is unclear. All I can say is that more points of principle seem to come from Blair and Brown than from Cameron anyday, which shows you how much of a vapid marketing exercise politics now is.

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Brown is perceived, quite rightly, as being strong. He might seem like a grumpy old sod, but he also speaks when he has something reasonably intelligent to say.

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Don't get me wrong, I'm no friend of the Brown administration, it has failed miserably in its core goal of law and order, with overcrowded prisons and moves to defer prison sentences and encourage some early releases. This is when there is someone under 18 stabbed to death every week in Britain. Money has been poured into public spending, often with derisory return and local authorities continue to be the new generation of fascist enterprises, keen to regulating and prosecute to ensure people follow the religion of recycling. Meanwhile, Labour signs up to a new EU treaty, which increases the role of Brussels in British affairs and continues to expand the bureaucracy of what should simply be a glorified free trade agreement. There is nothing much to celebrate from Labour, at best it has slowly taken some of Thatcher's reforms further, and in some instances backwards. It is distinctively uninterested in personal freedom, and uninterested in challenging the cultural wasteland of underclass worshipping Brits.

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The point is, the Tories are probably a slight improvement - but how can you trust political prostitutes who will sell everything they once stood for, for power. This is what happens when you're ashamed about freedom and capitalism, and don't know why they are both practical and moral.

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David Cameron has done a bit of good for the Tories, taking it out of the gentrified grey haired old bigoted white men brigade, ready to pass judgment on non Anglo-Saxon immigrants, gay couples and people of other religions (or none, good god!). However, he hasn't stood up for anything that couldn't also be seen in Labour or the Liberal Democrats.

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I wonder what other political party, and especially leader does that? and I wonder how long that honeymoon will last?