In a post down below I mused on what exactly it was that drove 'Trooper' Davis, ex-SAS, to resign his office and force a by-election. Last week The Spectator was unable to comment because they had gone to press but this week they offer two rather different explanations and forecasts. The editorial suggests that Davis might have either stumbled or deliberately stepped, it doesn't make clear which, into a new political zeitgeist. This new spirit of the age can be summed up as extreme fear and loathing on the part of the electorate for their parliamentarians. The editorial points out that whilst the inmates of Westminster have more or less universally sneered at Davis's gesture of abnegation, the public appear to admire it even if, in their contrary way, they mostly support the idea of locking up terrorist suspects for 42 days whilst awaiting charges. They rather like the almost unique sight and sound of a politician apparently taking personal risks with his career on a matter of principle. The Spectator also points at the success of another highly unusual, not to say downright eccentric, politician, Boris Johnson, who seems to have tapped into a source of public support precisely because he was not like any of the other machine-made, machine-controlled, machine politicians whom they now hate and despise.
By contrast, Fraser Nelson, a young but shrewd observer of the Westminster scene, dismissed Davis's action as misguided, or in the words of Sellar & Yeatman, "wrong but wromantic"! He quotes remarks made by Davis at a dinner party in which he, Davis, intimated that measures he believed necessary were unlikely to be implemented by a Cameron government. He quotes someone else as saying that 'it wasn't 42 days that did for David but 42 Old Etonians'! Personally I have some empathy with David Davis since both he and I were brought up by single, working mothers and both of us gravitated towards the military. I can understand his frustration with the general soppiness of so many 'straight-backed chinless wonders' with public school, Oxbridge backgrounds who, to quote an old American adage, 'have never had to meet a payroll'. Perhaps part of his motive was hidden in his secret knowledge that it was either, choose a suitable excuse to get out from under, or punch their lights out at the next shadow cabinet meeting! I suppose we shall have to wait for the history books to find out the real reason - I should live so long, my life, already! And who knows, perhaps fortune does indeed favour the brave - instead of giving them a posthumous VC which is the usual outcome. The editorial finishes with these words:
"The Davis campaign and Boris's mayoral triumph are important symptoms of a radically changing political landscape. So too is the decentralised, unregulated, sometimes anarchic energy of the web and political blogging: so-called 'wiki-politics'. For more than a decade, New Labour has governed by central control, message discipline and spin. The days of command and control are drawing to a close. A new less predictable culture is emerging fast. David Davis's actions, reckless though they are, must be seen in this new context. It is a context that Mr. Cameron will simply have to get used to."
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