The enemy within

Listening to David Cameron's bubble bursting yesterday, I hooted with laughter when he pleaded with us all to pull together.  As John Crace pointed out in the Guardian, the last time anyone said 'Your country needs You' it was Lord Kitchener and an entire generation got wiped out!  Worryingly, Cameron used the phrase twice...the body count could be high!


I was recently reading Ian Clayton's excellent 'Bringing It All Back Home', and the passage that stuck in my mind was when he quoted a previous Tory Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, describing the miners as the 'Enemy Within'.  Clayton's father, a miner, who had lost a couple of brothers who had answered their country's call in the Second World War, and whose grandfather, also a miner, had lost four brothers in the Great War, aimed a kick at the screen and never watched the television news again until the day that he died.

Cameron looked tired and rattled - it took Tony Blair many years before he started to show the strain of office quite as clearly as 'Dave' has managed in just five months.  The cracks in Cameron's leadership are starting to show, and his coalition's honeymoon period is coming to an end.  If the 'wrong' Milliband can get his act together quickly he might just be able to save us when the inevitable General Election comes.