Cameron - No longer in control

In his blog today, Raedwald argues that Cameron has "gone native" and claims that "He's always been a lazy man, only motivated to reaction at the last moment, and appears to have allowed Whitehall to run the roost in exchange for an easy life  ".

Whilst I agree with Raedwald's excellent listing of the symptoms, I must disagree with his diagnosis. He believes that there was once a "Cameron of brave words and loud principles would not allow the civil servants at the MOD to spend £1bn on credit cards and then refuse to disclose what they had spent it on. That Cameron would not spinelessly give way to senior police officers - themselves mired in an endemic and institutional corruption - on matters of civil liberty.", whereas I would assert that such a person has never ever existed.

My belief is that he is a "Blair Clone", and his whole image has been designed by Conservative Central Office PR experts to meet the public's expectation of a charismatic Prime Minister as, in their view, none of the other candidates standing for leadership had what they would consider to be the necessary qualities. Nevertheless, I would suggest that any one of them would have made a far better Prime Minister.
I don't believe Cameron has ever had any ideas of his own, his every action has been carefully choreographed by experts in reaction to the latest public opinion polls. Unfortunately, all the PR experts in the world are no match for the Whitehall machine, and having no idea how to cope with determined opposition to change, he quietly gives in to the Mandarins.

Cameron has shown himself incapable of handling what Harold Macmillan considered to be the greatest challenge for a statesman,  'Events, my dear boy, events'.  Over the past few weeks there have been quite a few events which had not been included in the carefully pre-arranged choreography. Each event has shown him to be totally inadequate, particularly when you compare him with some of the great Conservative leaders of the past. His reactions to the various events Coulson / News International / Phone hacking / Police resignations / Norway shootings have, in my view, bordered on panic and clearly show that he is totally incapable of coping with the unexpected.

Raedwald might be correct in concluding that Cameron has always been lazy; that wouldn't be too bad in itself if he had appointed competent Cabinet Members and then allowed them to get on with the job; the problem is that they weren't appointed on the basis of competency but political expediency. My conclusion is that Cameron is simply a wimp; he is unwilling to stamp his mark on  anything in case his judgement is wrong, the more so since Coulson, and all we can expect is that things will drift along until the next General Elections, with the government merely responding to events rather than causing them. Let us pray that we don't have a crisis demanding real leadership