Cameron's flop-flop

Yesterday PMQs was awful. Did Cameron really only muster four questions? If DC is going to go for the jugular, if he's going to choose to go all Punch-and-Judy for the Fleet Street hordes then he really ought to do it properly. Appearances like that make me wonder whether he went for the consensual style partly to cover up potential weakness at the dispatch box - he certainly has very little experience of it, but even his pre-rehearsed delivery of his pre-rehearsed lines didn't go down that well, despite the reception from Tory MPs.

What was needed, of course, was a spontaneous assault on Blair sustained by a slightly different approach to make the same point - which if you didn't see it was that Blair was flip-flopping on education and could no longer lead. The attack on Cameron for flip-flopping himself was of course from the same Prime Minister who ran for election by the people of this country on a manifesto which later proved not to be worth the expensive paper it was printed on. A manifesto which said "we will not introduce top-up fees and have legislated to prevent them". A Government which later introduced them and had done nothing to prevent them. Cameron might be modernising and changing his party, but one area he would never even consider learning anything from New Labour is in misleading the country and flip-flopping over manifesto pledges they were elected on, he should have said. But didn't.

Incidentally - and I know I've said this before - but isn't flip-flop the most hateful expression in the modern political vocabulary? I was so disappointed when it caught on so much in the last US Presidential election as it just degrades and devalues any debate and, in and of itself, explains nothing. It's like those interminable debates about whether someone is a socialist or not. Tedious, sounds very important, but is actually just inane.

UPDATE: Guido's got a great new slogan for DC.