I agree with Tim Montgomerie's article on Cameron almost entirely.
So here is his article below thanks to The Times newspaper:
I hesitate to be the bearer of bad news but while there may still be 775 days until the end of this Parliament, the general election campaign is already in full swing. It started last Wednesday when George Osborne delivered his fourth and most political Budget. Almost every announcement was designed to tickle the tummies of the voters that the Tories need in order to stay in office. First-time housebuyers, the low-waged, motorists, working mums and, of course, pasty-eating beer drinkers. They were all targeted with as much help as a near-bankrupt country can’t afford. This is a Government that is no longer focused on its Plan A for deficit reduction. Downing Street is focused on Plan B(eer) for re-election.
The Government’s retreat from a focus on deficit reduction has happened in stages but there can be no doubt that the retreat is now almost total. Last year the Government borrowed about £120 billion. It will borrow about £120 billion this year and a similar record-breaking amount next year. At the end of this Parliament, in the year we were promised the deficit was to be eliminated, annual borrowing will still be £100 billion. By 2015 the national debt will be heading over £1,500 billion. It will be the year in which taxpayers are paying more to service the nation’s debts than they’ll be spending on policing and schools.
It didn’t have to be this way. The Government could have made a fundamental re-evaluation of what kind of State we could afford. It could have abolished whole Whitehall departments, ended universal benefits and brought public and private sector wages in line. It could have used the crisis to enact landmark changes to tax, banking and energy policies to supercharge national competitiveness. We got neither big cuts nor big vision.
The Chancellor and Prime Minister still hope — with good reason — that there’ll be just enough economic uplift by polling day to persuade voters that their period of stewardship hasn’t been for nothing. They will run a version of Barack Obama’s successful re-election campaign. We will be told that progress may be limited but that it would be a gross folly to hand the country back to the party that wrecked things in the first place. So long as Ed Miliband and Ed Balls are leading the Opposition, they have a reasonable chance of succeeding.
Mr Cameron’s shift from mending the economy to saving his electoral bacon is only the latest in a long line of “strategic adjustments”. He has struggled ever to define a mission, let alone stick to one. His big idea was once the Big Society, and climate change was his top priority. Neither gets much attention any more. He launched his leadership bid with a promise to recognise marriage in the tax system and, in 2007, he saved his leadership by promising to abolish inheritance tax for all but millionaires. Today there is no marriage tax allowance and inheritance tax is going up. He promised not to reorganise the NHS or to regulate the press by statute. We all know what happened to both promises.
No 10 attempts to bat away all criticisms of Mr Cameron by pointing to opinion polls that suggest that he is more popular than large parts of his party. And it’s true that Mr Cameron is good on telly and portrays a reassuring, wholesome family image. But are these really the qualities our country needs at this moment?
There are many examples of institutions that have gone backwards or failed to prosper under popular or charismatic leaders. In recent times, one might think of the Catholic Church under John Paul II where, despite the Pope’s personal holiness, the moral degeneration of large parts of the Church went unaddressed. Or — to go from the sublime to the near-ridiculous — one can think of Tottenham Hotspur under the charismatic Harry Redknapp. Spurs were a good team under his management but they are only beginning to fulfil their true potential under the less charismatic but more technically astute André Villas-Boas.
Successful leaders guard and develop the underlying institution. At some point leaders must be judged by their success at doing that, rather than by their own celebrity or popularity.
What, then, about the country and the Conservative Party under Mr Cameron? The coalition will deliver significant improvements to our schools, to the welfare system and to the accountability of the police, but the central issue of our time is the national debt. That at least is what the Prime Minister told us three years ago. At the end of this Parliament the nation’s debt problem won’t be better. It will be worse. Much worse.
In its postwar history the Conservative Party enjoyed three principal electoral advantages: a mass membership grassroots organisation, a supportive centre-right press and a monopoly of the centre-right vote. Under Mr Cameron, the long-term membership decline has accelerated. Worse, there have been no efforts to build a digital machine to compensate for that decline. Relations with the press have deteriorated badly, probably irreparably. And, third, and most significantly, for the first time in the postwar period large numbers of centre-right voters have, in UKIP, a new vehicle for their concerns.
In regretting Mr Cameron’s unfocused, drifting leadership, I don’t recommend to the Conservative Party that it chooses a new leader. The nation’s problems are complex. There is no political messiah sitting behind Mr Cameron in the Commons, or indeed opposite him. The country may need a statesman in charge — someone with a plan to restore competitiveness and to ensure that everyone in every part of Britain shares in the prosperity that results — but I can’t see an obvious candidate.
Mr Cameron can claim achievements that will stand the test of history: his support for gay marriage, for example; his investment in transformational vaccination programmes for the world’s poorest people; his lifting of nearly 3 million poorly paid Britons out of the income tax system. Overall, however, to reapply a phrase used by the Labour leader on Saturday, Mr Cameron’s leadership of the Tory party is looking dangerously like a lost decade. The decade began with a promise to save the world’s climate and rebuild conservatism. Cameronism then became a more modest project to balance the nation’s books.
By 2015 the shrinkage will be complete. The Tory leader will stand before the country with the thin claim that he’s not as bad as Ed Miliband. It may be enough to keep him in No 10, but it’s a depressing prospect for the country.
Tim Montgomerie can more usually be found here.
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