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“... of uncharismatic right-wing leaders came to an end with the accession to the party leadership of David Cameron, a smoother, less straightforward kind of Conservative. Cameron recognised that if he was to ‘detoxify’ the Tory brand, loosen its association with uncaring Thatcherite economics, then he needed to ...”

“... a specialist team at RAF Waddington trained at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. Over the summer, David Cameron had suggested that he hoped the British air war against Isis could be extended from Iraq to Syria. But, he said, nothing would change – after the withdrawal from Afghanistan, Iraq was the only permitted target – until Parliament was ...”

“... a wanker? In a world that divides between the people who divide it in two and those who don’t, Cameron is squarely in the former camp. During the summer of 2014 he was putting the finishing touches to a government reshuffle that would see him shunt his old friend Michael Gove from the Department of Education to a new role as chief whip. In effect he was ...”

“... was to make major headlines and be more than a support act for the clash of the Davids. With David Cameron boyishly – and buoyantly – installed in the middle of the opposition front bench, the time was at last ripe for overthrowing Kennedy. If the conspirators had waited too much longer, there was always the danger that they might have found ...”

“... certainly sound more gung-ho to applaud the ‘tough message’ that the courts are conveying, as David Cameron has done, or to say along with John Thornhill, the chairman of the Magistrates Association, that the sheer volume of riot-related criminality justifies disproportionate punishments. But there is a dangerous whiff of bullshit accompanying the ...”

“... Of all the many tributes to Michael Foot it was David Cameron who hit the nail on the head. He was, Cameron said, ‘almost the last link to a more heroic age in politics’. In appearance, and demeanour, Foot resembled an Old Testament prophet. An impression which, in later life, his shock of white hair, the passion of his delivery and the magnificence of his rhetoric served only to enhance ...”

“... Australians), they seem to have been unembarrassable. Yet that’s not how it worked over here. David Laws’s 22 Days in May, which recounts the negotiations that preceded the formation of the coalition government from the inside, explains how it happened that in our case the winners actually ended up winning. Hardly surprisingly, it’s not that Lib Dem ...”

“... to extend British airstrikes against Islamic State from Iraq to Syria began in November when David Cameron set out his case to Parliament in relatively decorous terms. By 2 December, when Parliament voted in favour, an older, cruder performance had emerged. One of the prime minister’s enactments back in November was the voice that accompanies TV ...”

“... book features a cartoon from the Independent: an apocalyptic lightning flash strikes and anoints David Cameron, while Brown and Alistair Darling flee London as Parliament quakes against the background of a setting sun. Andrew Rawnsley’s The End of the Party is less dramatic: we see Brown, Mandelson and Blair in a morning-after sprawl; Brown’s big ...”

“... It was ‘odd’, he said, to deny that Islam was the central element of the various struggles. David Cameron has moved in the same direction. The day after the 7/7 attacks, when he was shadow education secretary, he said that ‘the Muslim community in this country doesn’t support what is happening.’ Earlier this year he modified that ...”

“... the RAF (the French call it Scalp). The Declaration on Defence and Security Co-operation signed by David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy at their summit on 2 November specifically anticipates Anglo-French collaboration on ‘an assessment of enhancements to the Scalp/Storm Shadow cruise missiles’ and joint development ‘of the equipment and technologies ...”

“... anywhere in occupied Europe. Despite the fact that the UK is not a member of the eurozone, David Cameron has joined with Merkel in hectoring the recalcitrant Greeks. Not so long ago Cameron, on his first visit to the US as prime minister, declared in an interview with ABC News that, in 1940, Britain was the ...”

“... destroy them as a political force in the process. Up went tuition fees, and out went Nick Clegg. David Cameron was the salesman, Clegg was the punch-bag, but Osborne was the one pulling the strings. Whenever he became the focus of attention, as he did after his ‘omnishambles’ budget in 2012, his lack of presentational skills came close to being his ...”

“... power, some moments now look like straws in the wind. In late November 2010 the English FA sent David Cameron, Prince William and David Beckham to Fifa headquarters in Zurich to lobby on its behalf before the vote for the right to host the 2018 World Cup. Two old Etonians and an alumnus of Chingford County High ...”

“... from government: from the government, that is, of the rump UK, minus Scotland. The reason is that David Cameron, attempting to outflank the SNP during a midwinter silly season offensive, has managed to provoke Scotland’s first minister, Alex Salmond, into a daring dash for independence. Salmond is not – as the English fail miserably to understand ...”