Talking of the Sun, a paper which will apparently go to any lengths to blast Labour now that it has officially backed the Conservatives, there is a fascinating attack on David Cameron’s brand of Toryism from its senior columnist Kelvin MacKenzie in today’s edition of the tabloid. Unfortunately, the piece is not online, but there is an account of it on Luke Akehurst’s blog here, which includes this passage:
[Zac Goldsmith] represents the rich boys’ club which so dominates the leadership of the Tory party . . . I worry that they don’t really understand the ordinary working man and woman in this country . . . The trouble is, I’m not sure that the Tories haven’t simply become a Jobcentre Plus for Old Etonians. Gordon Brown has made a terrible hash of things but his heart has always been in the right place. If the Tories want to run our country, they must prove to the electorate that the heart is not something simply next to the wallet.
The attack is pegged on Goldsmith’s non-dom status, but it contains some more general, intriguing points, too. Unfortunately I read it in a café, as you do, over lunch, and I have an unmovable policy not to buy the paper, so — not realising the article wasn’t on the web — I’m unable to reproduce it in full. But, from memory, it starts by saying something like MacKenzie has a problem with the Conservatives and so, judging by the polls, do some of you (ie, Sun readers). At a time when Brown is under criticism for allegedly launching a “class war” on Cameron’s Tories (something I touch on in this week’s column), MacKenzie appears to, um, do just that. He also adds that he is a “natural Conservative”.
I wonder what the right-wing blogosphere makes of that.
PS: Of course, and I was scanning the piece for a reference to this but failed to find one, this attack may not be completely unconnected to Goldsmith’s own attack on the Sun in recent days.
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