Cameron: Meet the new boss...

William Hague on David Cameron:

"I can see him as prime minister and I think he is now ready to be prime minister."

Frankly, I can't see why Hague would say anything different. This would have been more of a news story if Hague had said "he's not quite ready yet" or "you know what, he's an ok choice - but I think I would be a better one."

But how, precisely, has Cameron shown himself to be ready for the job of PM? What has he done? He's popular at the moment, but that in itself is not a great reason to claim to be ready for the job of PM. The Artic Monkeys are popular; no-one is suggesting that they are ready to be Prime Minister. Cameron's popularity is based purely on not being Gordon Brown; which is a bollocks reason for making someone PM. You may as well make Cameron PM for not being Peter Sutcliffe.

However some would argue, including Hague, that is it also Tory policy that has caused the change in the party's fortunes:

He said Tory plans to raise the inheritance tax threshold, abolish stamp duty for first-time buyers and scrap the ID card scheme had helped towards that "switch".

Good policies, but, fuck me, it is hardly a radical, bold argument for the Tories, is it? A couple of tax cuts and the summary elimination of ID cards is hardly the radical solutions that modern Britain is in need of.

After over a decade of patronising, oppressive Nu Labour rule, this country is crying out for a Libertarian government. But, as Guido and DK note, freedom doesn't seem to be on the Tories' agenda. In fact, with unmitigated bollocks like Gove's attack on lads' magazines, the opposite seems to be true. At a time when they have the popularity and the opportunity to fight for social as well as economic freedom, they are shrinking in their ambition, and are becoming the sort of tedious social conservatives whose moralising would be better placed in Victorian times rather than in 21st Century Britain.

The sales exercise of making the Tories warm and fluffy is over - people trust them again, people no longer see them as pure evil, they no longer feel they eat babies for fun in the corridors of power. The Tories - particularly given Labour is currently about a popular as herpes in a nunnery - can afford to be bold, and could offer real change. But they won't.

Because, fundamentally, they don't want to. The party is innately conservative - it doesn't like change. The thought of being radical is alien to them. They will tinker with the Nu Labour legacy, and perhaps remove some of the worst excesses of this illiberal incumbent government. But there won't be a major change. Things will stay, in the now very likely Tory government, pretty much the same.

Which is why I am the member of a party who, if they can truly get off the ground, actually offer a substantial departure to the status quo. And I know that those who have fallen under the spell of Cameron and neutered Tory party will ultimately end up disappointed. There is nothing radical on the horizon; just a more photogenic Prime Minister and minor tinkering with a system that is clearly, and obviously, corrupt, fucked and rotten to the core.