Dave: spinning out of control.

Who is Cameron’s spin-meister these days? I have lost touch since the Wickford wide-boy became a guest of HMP. Whoever he (or she) might be is doing a lousy job.

 

Dave’s presentation of his EU ‘negotiations’ was a train-crash. He was absent from the debate. He was widely mocked. One Red Top headline was ‘Who do you think EU  are kidding, Mr Cameron?’ It came across, as the Bard said, as ‘a thing of sound and fury, signifying nothing’. It simply confirmed the widespread assumption right from the beginning that  these so-called negotiations were nothing more than a snow job.

 

It is becoming more evident that the footling ‘concessions’  which Brussels has condescended to grant to put in Dave’s begging bowl will simply be brushed off as time goes on. Post-referendum, we will notice nothing different.

 

This came immediately after Cameron, for some unaccountable reason, rushed into print, thundering in the Sunday Times with both the headline story and a personal article about ‘discrimination’ against blacks in university admissions practices.

 

Given the left-leaning libertarian proclivities of our centres of learning, it is more likely to be the other way round.

 

Whoever drafted this stuff deserves an early bath. Its fatal fault was simply that it was wrong. The spinner didn’t do his basic research.

 

So here’s the reality check.

 

Last year nearly 70% of Africans got 5 good GCSE grades. Whites got 65%, and Caribbeans 60%. Just under 60% of Africans will go on to university, with slightly under 40% for Caribbeans and about 30% for whites. So where’s the discrimination?

 

Then came the fiasco over his scare mongering on Calais refugees, who, he said, would come flooding into Dover on Brexit, not quite mentioning that the control of immigrants in ‘the jungle’  by UK immigration staff turns on  two direct agreements with the French Government and nothing to do with Brussels.

 

And the latest is his new-found crusade for prison reform. But we the people know full well that there are two caveats here. The first is that the very sensible proposals for  a new approach to imprisonment comes  from Michael Gove (perhaps as a consolation for being forced to ditch his human rights reform agenda, leaving the ECHR free to stop the UK deporting terrorists, which may come as news to many as there has been no clear announcement to this effect).

 

The second is that the shambles that the Prison Service has become is of Cameron’s own making, or rather of his disaster-on-legs, Chris Grayling. He it was who, not content with banning books in prisons, cutting legal aid, charging for courts time, and interfering with the reports of the Chief Inspector of Prisons, slashed the prisons budget by a sum not unadjacent to £900 million, reduced staffing levels by about 30% when the prison population was growing.

 

As with Blair, Cameron seems to believe that he must pontificate on every issue instead of leaving things to his Ministers. The outcome is over-exposure and a bored public.

 

As a former spin-doctor himself, Cameron of all people should have grasped this.