I can't read Cameron's book, I might throw up!

That being the case, I must rely on Mr. Fraser Nelson's opinion upon which I have relied for 'many a year and oft' given that he is editor of The Spectator.  Today, in The Telegraph, he reviews 'Dim' Dave's memoir and the first thing I learned was that my appellation of "Dim" was way below the reality.  The man is dim, dumb, deaf and daft beyond description.  Some of us might, after a heavy night down the pub, attempt to walk through a brick wall but not many of us would keep on trying over and over again even as the cuts and abrasions and injuries mount.  Nor would many of us - any of us? - urge others to do the same!  But Dim Dave did - and still does!

"For The Record" [the title of his memoir] was written as political tragedy, a 700-page apology to the nation for the former prime minister’s role in what he regards as a calamity.

But it’s also a candid account of how he pursued an idea – that the EU can be reformed – and tested it to (his) destruction. We see him making allies, drafting strategies, threatening and begging – but his story ends in failure. He expected diplomacy, but encountered a bureaucratic Death Star whose hunger for power is matched only by its intransigence. From the former Remainer-in-Chief, it’s quite a story.

I'm sure it is but I am not sure if I possess enough sick-bags to read it!  With my emphases throughout.

Once inside its inner circle, he was exposed to the horrors. The directives, the stitch-ups, the knives always out for the City of London. […]. The purpose of these meetings, he discovered, was to grind everyone into submission. Including, eventually, him.

He found the EU to be “peacenik” on security, unable to respond to threats on its doorstep. He vetoed one of the eurozone bailout packages that threatened to suck in Britain, only to see the rules changed so the UK veto would not count.  When the UK tried to go its own way, it “wasn’t simply a disagreement with the others, it was a heresy against the scripture”. He thought Angela Merkel nice, but unreliable. He refers to the “half-life of a Merkel promise”: the time taken between her making one and breaking it. In general, he found “Germany’s unfailing ability to get what it wants in the end.”

And he was surprised?!!!!!!!

Britain’s ability to get what it wants was, by contrast, pretty minimal. When the federalist Jean-Claude Juncker was put forward as European Commission president, Cameron was shocked to discover that just two of the 28 EU member states’ leaders wanted him.

There is a touch of Mr Smith Goes to Washington about what happened next: why, he asks then, go along with this stitch-up? He stays up late drinking wine with fellow leaders, and they promise to back him in stopping Juncker. Then Merkel decides it’s not worth the fight, so they all support a massive decision that they all know to be wrong.

Hello!  Earth to 'Planet SoD'!  Are you reading this?

Cameron goes home appalled. But as he was to find out, this is how things work. “‘Anyone who says that the EU is an organisation based on law and not politics has never seen it act under pressure,” he records. “Whenever there was pressure to transfer powers to Brussels, the lawyers always found a way, but when I wanted to take powers back, those same lawyers always opposed it.” It is a formula to trap democracies: use complex laws and regulation to suck powers in, but never give them back.

Never mind, chaps, 'Steady the Buffs' and all that sort of thing, let's try walking through that brick wall again!

Dealing with their officials, he says, was even worse. “To them, I was a dangerous heretic stamping on their sacred texts.” He records with amazement how the Germans (and others) saw the EU as the fount of democracy, where Brits only ever wanted a forum for economic co-operation.

And still he fails to see the 'bleedin' obvious':

There is almost nothing in those 700 pages to explain why EU membership is a good thing. There is not a single example of anything emanating from Brussels that benefits Britain. So why does he start to talk about Britain’s future being in the EU and about it being a fundamental part of who we are as a country?

Dim, he most certainly is given that he cannot see the truth of what he, himself, has written!

But the great value of Cameron’s book is its candour. He recorded his thoughts once a month, wrote each chapter from the perspective of what he felt at the time, and has not twisted the facts to suit his final conclusion. He regards Brexit as a disaster, but those who read his book would be tempted to see it as liberation. A great democracy was being squeezed inside an unaccountable bureaucracy, and no one else in Europe wanted to risk their career by challenging it – or giving voters the chance to escape it. But Cameron did. He might, one day, come to see it as the greatest single service he did his country.

Thank you, Mr. Nelson, you have just saved me from several weeks of bilious fury which would have accompanied any effort on my part to read 'Mr. Magoo's' nauseating memoir.  Given our long history, we have, er, 'enjoyed' the leadership of countless twits as Prime Ministers but I doubt that many of them could plumb the depths of stupidity reached by David Cameron!

 

 

Comments

[Timbo]

I need to go and lie down for a while after reading your summary. How anyone can support the Remoaner POV is beyond me.

[Whitewall]

Cameron met the EUropean enemy and found them...perplexing?

[Whyaxye]

Now he seems to have changed his mind (or what passes for his mind) and is saying that we need to honour the result of the referendum. Only last week he was calling for a second referendum.

[Bob]

Some professionals in politics or psychology might want to read a book by one of the dumbest politicians to ever draw breath, but why would anyone else?

[Glesga]

Bob, dumb people would waste their money on his book. The dumb people were remainers who want my country to be run by other countries.

[Loz]

So Dave met a political system that was better than him and his own nation state's system. A system that defeated him every time, ran like a well oiled machine, got done what needed to be done.

And all those doings came down to the 500 million people of the third estate for their benefit. Rules and regulations that took them from the rubble of WW2 to previously unknown levels of liberty and prosperity.

Each and every criticism he levels is actually an admiration. An admission that the EU is better at politics than Blighty's own handbag-less main man sat, as he was, atop a heap of pols whose only "achievements" were in the category of a fox-hunting ban, gay marriage, and safe spaces at uni while the NHS routinely starved and dehydrated 10,000 vulnerable people to death per annum, Social Services handed over 1300 white girls to Muslim rape gangs for use as masturbation toys, and state education churned out a generation of unemployables that business spurned in favour of Mr Frantisek's now out of his blue uniform and a demonstrably smarter and harder worker.

Dave's not alone. Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Poland, Hungary and Germany all ran into the brick wall of this better functioning power also, thereby learning their own failings while being helped out of the damaging consequences.

All of these nation states fked up in the ways known to us over the last dacade ...

- Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Ireland:. Fiscal and financial incontinence
- Poland, Hungary: Counter- separation of powers polity
- Germany: Throwing open the gates of Vienna, "We can manage"

And the European RoboCop stepped out of the broom cupboard, pooper-scooper in hand, and cleared up the messes.

It's fashionable to hate the police, but if you can't look after yourself try imagining blithering around in a world of Trump, Putin, and Ping-a-Ling on your own with Dave or now Dad's Army and the Bolsheviks having "taken back control".

And that's where Nelson and you don't get it. You imagine that you are somehow personally the PM, the we-we-we - we can do this, we can do that, if we take back control - is somehow you. You are not the PM! You are an individual in the third estate. Even if you'd voted in the exact opposite direction in every election at the national (2nd estate) or European (1st estate) level it wouldn't have changed one iota of a thing in your life or anyone else's life at all.

So why hope that one or other of these remote and authoritarian powers would have sole stewardship of your life? And more so, why hope that the self-acknowledged worst of the two should have sole stewardship of your life?!

Instead, why not observe that when the two powers of the first and second estate compete for your control they smash into each other, reveal their failings, and weaken their authoritarianism. For example, RoboCop himself, although on an upswing at the moment as demonstrated by the above list of nation state cock-ups, also had a failing in the 90's when the whole executive in Brussels had to resign due to corruption and malfeasance sniffed out by the nation states.

The European confederacy has been a miracle for I-I-I the third estarer for 45 years: a self-correcting mechanism that shakes out the wrong doings of the 1st and 2nd estate and keeps me safe.

You might hate the police, but you gotta love RoboCop and his 28 deputies.

And I do. All of them, blue uniforms and all.

SoD

[Wigner’s Friend]

SoD

All I can say is just look at the history of those who have just been selected in the highest positions in the organisation. They make our politicians look honest and trustworthy.

[JK]

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/09/deplorables.php

Might not be able to stomach Call Me Dave's without proper preparation David, but with proper preparation - maybe!

[JK]

https://www.spiked-online.com/video/deplorables-trump-brexit-and-the-demonised-masses/

Source.

The opening sounds promising.

[Loz]

Jeez this blind spot in you guys is extraordinary ...

https://www.google.com/amp/s/blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/09/its-no-surprise-that-brexit-looks-doomed/amp/

Spends the whole article telling us that Blighty's past pols were far worse than today's incompetent, negligent and abusive bunch, citing the endless stream of cock-ups and cataclysms since around 1850, then rounds off with this ...

the Brexiters will be saying to the Remainers: ‘There, there – what was all that fuss about?'

How is that possible if the incompetent, negligent and abusive bunch he's just spent the article dissing for the last 169 years have "taken back control"?!

SoD

[Whitewall]

With Italy’s Salvini out of office, the EU is wasting no time in steamrolling its open borders agenda. Europe continues to kill itself. Europe is being run by a cabal of bad people who want to seem virtuous.

[David Duff]

'Calm down, dear', at least our nincompoops managed to avoid starting two world wars!

[Wigner’s Friend]

“Jeez this blind spot in you guys is extraordinary”. Pot-Kettle. You liken the EU leaders to robocop and yet the nominee for Justice Commissioner is being investigated for corruption and the person appointed to lead the European Bank has been found guilty of financial negligence while in a similar but lower position. Someone has a blind spot and it’s not us.