David Cameron is in the doghouse at the moment, thanks to his lobbying efforts on behalf of Greensill, a company in which he had a commercial interest and which collapsed earlier this year. Many of the commentators writing about Cameron’s current difficulties have presented it as the latest episode in the ongoing psychodrama between him and Boris, seeing in Boris’s reluctance to come to the former Prime Minister’s aid yet more evidence of the long-standing rivalry between the two. I co-produced a docudrama about that subject for Channel 4 in 2009 called When Boris Met Dave that you can watch here. The dramatised bits are rubbish, but the interviews are very good.
Consequently, I was interested to read a blog post by Russell David about how different the past 13 months might have been had Cameron been Prime Minister instead of Boris. His hypothesis – not too far fetched in my view – is that Cameron would have made a better fist of things. In particular, he would have stuck to the UK Government’s Pandemic Preparedness Strategy and not succumbed to the domestic and international pressure to impose a lockdown. He would have kept his head, when all about him were losing theirs. Well, “all” apart from Stefan Löfven, the Swedish Prime Minister.
Russell’s post, published on his Mad World blog, takes the form of a month-by-month diary, chronicling how events might have unfolded had Cameron been in charge. Here are the entries for August, September and October:
August 2020
Covid rates are now very low in the UK but Cameron, advised by medical experts like Sunetra Gupta, John Lee and Carl Heneghan, puts plans in place for the NHS to cope in the coming months for a possible resurgence of what seems, according to worldwide data, to be a virus strongly linked with seasonality. Thousands of nurses are put on training courses for working in ICU wards so the health service will be prepared when winter arrives. Cameron has rejected plans for widespread testing of healthy people as he is aware of a ‘casedemic’ of false positives that will frighten people, and he has not spent £22 billion on a ‘Track and Trace’ system because he has been advised that it would be pointless in a non-totalitarian state and when a virus is endemic. Looking at the government’s own data he sees that international travel and hospitality are responsible for just a tiny fraction of Covid infections, so has no plans to shut either down; he realises in a grim year people still need some pleasures.September 2020
Just as Cameron raged at “green crap”, he now rages at the “Covid death within 28 days of a positive test crap”, and the time period is reduced to one week. Under his Government, it has remained the case that two doctors have to sign the death certificate, not one, as happened in a loopy alternate reality from March 2020. The government heavily promotes its ‘Myth Buster’ website, which focuses on things like the lack of evidence for Covid being spread by fomite transmission (germs left on objects), to calm the populace.October 2020
Officials seek to reassure young people worried about the virus. “You are literally at more danger of carking it by putting your trousers on!” goes one light-hearted public health advert with a cartoon of a purple pair of flares. It is criticised for frivolity, but statisticians point out that it is technically correct – more teenagers die every year putting their trousers on (and, presumably, falling over and hitting their head) than would die in the same period from Covid-related illness. When Piers Morgan rages that Covid is like Spanish Flu, new health secretary Iain Duncan Smith calmly comes out with the following: “The median age of victim of the Spanish Flu was 28; with Covid it is 82. Spanish Flu claimed 3% of the world’s population; Covid has claimed around 0.04%, and 94% of those had an average of 2.6 co-morbidities. Covid has an average survival rate of 99.75%, much higher for those under 65.” Such measured words help to reassure the nation and dampen mental health troubles that many had been risk of succumbing to.
Clearly, Russell’s counter-factual history is an idealised version of what might have been – no doubt Cameron wouldn’t have been quite this sensible. But it’s an entertaining read nonetheless.
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
The text version features in this mornings Roundup.
The main thing I would have added was that Cameron would have stressed throughout Lockdown 1. no children were randomly keeling over and dying of Covid instead of concealing that fact until three days before wanting schools to reopen for the summer 2020 term thinking that Govt./SAGE/nudge squad could switch public fear on and off like a tap.
I’mma gonna say no. Before this whole thing started a lot of people thought Boris would be a leader that cares for people’s liberty and for the traditional British spirit. Public opinion (at least among conservatories and brexiteers) was that Boris was head and shoulders above Cameron, a much better PM. He did deliver Brexit, didn’t he? And then look at what a spineless creature he turned out to be.
There’s no knowing if Cameron would have been better than Boris. But we can make an educated guess looking at the average European leader. I think it’s safe to say that Cameron would have been as much of a lockdown lover as the next guy.
” Before this whole thing started a lot of people thought Boris would be a leader that cares for people’s liberty”
Well – given his known track record, that should be taken simply as an indicator of how a large proportion of the populace are gullible and intellectually impoverished in the ability to assess evidence staring them in the face.
Which the Covid disaster has proved.
“the traditional British spirit”
What’s that then? Perhaps it’s just being brought out after the anomaly of WWII. ;-).
Grovelling to authority – as we saw last weekend (and will have another dose this weekend) – was, of course always traditionally part of it, I guess. As has been the traditional incompetence of a large slice of the grovelled-to.
You write:
… given his known track record, that should be taken simply as an indicator of how a large proportion of the populace are gullible and intellectually impoverished in the ability to assess evidence staring them in the face.
What do you mean by that? His character flaws? Indifferent performance as Foreign Secretary?
Genuine question.
I tend to agree. Boris was always marketed as a caring, liberal buffoon who put country first. He was seen as being in tune with the people. Those of us who have worked in high level marketing know how successful these tactics can be and saw through the scam. However, none of us thought he would be capable of what his father could be as he was much more involved with British politics than EU politics and his wife Marina was an arch Brexiteer.
However, times change and Boris made one mistake too many for his wife. He got involved with a Climate change zealot, working for the Clintons and the Globalists. She was and is domineering, aggressive and ambitious. He is putty in her hands. He has no morals so is ripe fir the picking.
The British people were under the illusion that an illustrious education meant intelligence and critical thinking. The British people have learned a painful but useful lesson over the last 30 years. Education doesn’t mean you are intelligent, far from it. Education means you can be indoctrinated with bad ideas and habits. Education means you lose the ability to think, aspire and achieve what matters to you and your family. Education is NOT the best policy for the growth and success of a nation. Hard work, creativity, self sufficiency and patriotism makes successful nations and strong leaders. Let us hope that this whole globalist cartel can be swept away and sent to their Nirvana on another planet, before they do more damage.
Many people will share your hope, but our system of democracy will ensure it is unlikely to be fulfilled. One other point to make is the classic weakness of an older man being snared by a younger woman. What emotional intelligence Boris has is located in his testes
Agree
Thank you. That sums things up beautifully especially the bit about his wife to be.
I actually think she has been planted, nothing has been the same since her arrival. i enjoyed your post enourmously.
Most definitely, it does infuriate me when people say that we voted them in so can’t complain….when in actual fact it would have played out the same no matter who is in the chair. Starmer is a complete joke as well.
When you’re not given any real voting choice, e.g. in my constituency there was the choice between Tory, Labour, Lib Dem, or Green party.
That was it.
The main difference at that point in December 2019 was whether you voted for a pro or anti Brexit party.
Brian’s support for continued mass immigration was known, as were his other flaws, but when his main opposition was Corbyn and Momentum, there really wasn’t much choice.
Boris was elected to close the borders and end freedom of movement. He got Brexit done, and was then handed an opportunity to do more. He is not spineless at all. He is a mighty tyrant. He has an absolutely unbreakable iron will to amass as much power to himself as possible, by draining it away from his subjects.
The heir to Blair? This is a non-starter question. They’re all in the same club = the same result.
It would have been the same result. Following the european herd. Sweden was an outlier because of the way public health was devolved to the experts and that Sweden’s experts weren’t retarded
Yer’ve godda larff!
Laughable suggestions. Ole Cast-Iron would only have differed in that he would have been a bit quicker off the blocks!
A more worthwhile exercise would be to compare how an earlier Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan dealt with a real pandemic in 1957 i.e. the Asian Flu.
Or an earlier Labour PM the epidemic in the ’60s?
Indeed.
Probably the only Prime Minister since Macmillan who would’ve been a locdown sceptic is Thatcher. It’s probably no coincidence that she’s the only one, to the best of my knowledge, that had a science degree, as well as more balls than any of the male PM’s we’ve had for a long time.
She certainly had the courage of her convictions.
Exactly. I doubt whether any other Prime Minister in living memory would have been strong enough to lead Britain in a different direction from where most other countries were going.
It’s sad that we’ve learned nothing about how our governance system works from this process. This was a globally coordinated effort that started with a declaration from the WHO, who have continued to run it thereafter.
Your Prime Minister has precious little to do with it other than relaying the dictates of the global body above him. If you still can’t see that after over a year (and running a website that’s sceptical of lockdowns!) then I really do despair for you.
All the data and all all the pithy arguments will achieve nothing if you’re appealing for your liberty to a functionary with no power to do anything about it.
Exactly. It’s like we’ve just stepped out a time-warp to the old political perceptions before this tyranny started. For the record, I have been arguing for nearly two decades that our political system is rigged and utterly corrupted beyond most people’s imagination. Voting merely validates it and has little to no effect on the long-term trajectory of where this country is going. If Labour were in power, we’d be seeing something resembling Scotland and Wale’s authoritarianism. It’d no doubt be worse than what we are experiencing under the Tories, but ultimately, it’s all varying degrees of the same shit.
Yeah, when I see articles like this and people saying some flavour of “just those Tories wait until the next election!” I want to go and live in the middle of the ocean, as far away from stupidity as I can get.
Can I come with you?
Of course. Anyone from LS is welcome. Just please don’t tell any of those mask wearing spacewasters where we’re going.
“It’d no doubt be worse than what we are experiencing under the Tories“
You wish. But that’d be pretty difficult – even with Starmer doing the deed.
So what’s your solution? I’ve seen people whinging like this about politics for decades – and doing sod all about it.
The current state of things is as much to do with the ‘I never vote’ army, the ‘F. knows why I vote’ regiment and ‘They’re all the same’ platoon, as much as it’s the result of those who are sicked up by the system into parliament.
It’s been a while in the making.
Voting doesn’t mean anything when the politicians you elect take their orders from supra-national bodies and when a network of international banks and trade bodies control our economy.
National politics and the Left-Right paradigm haven’t meant anything since capital became global rather than nationally constrained.
What do you do about it? Accept the reality of it and begin to wean yourself off the centralised services you rely on and begin to cultivate trading networks you can exercise some control over. The British co-operative movement, whilst it had some problems, deserves revisiting. Otherwise you’ll face the utter dominance of the “Green New Deal” revolution that’s coming over the next few years with nothing to fall back on.
Why am I not surprised to get a typically aggressive reply from you… The smallest of criticism of your beloved socialism and you pounce like the prat you are, trying to shut down opinions that don’t fit with your way of thinking.
Do me a favour; next time you want to respond to one of my comments – don’t. I’m not interested in your tantrums.
Matt, 99% of the population can’t see it so I wouldn’t be too surprised.
Boris is no functionary and he does have power. Any time he goes on live TV to the nation, he could choose to tell the truth about the global body above him. And if he gets arrested or shot for doing so, it would be on live TV with millions of people watching.
Lockstep all over the world. Cameron would have done nothing different.
The president of Tanzania paid the ultimate price for defying the WHO.
100% correct ditto Burundi, and who in the mainstream or public even knows or cares.
Funny how the modern imperialists are beyond criticism.
No blm rallies for him , no black voices speaking up , maybe the Open Society funding would dry up ?
What a joke .
I agree.
It’s an interesting question, but the real question is what qualities would have been required of leader in this situation?
Leaving aside the current PM’s many faults, let’s assume the average national leader is not stupid, has some political nous, the ability to get things done, some ability to communicate and motivate, ability to question experts, some attention to detail. The PM may not have all of these, but most of these qualities are possessed to some degree by a lot of leaders who have gone along with the coronapanic.
So what’s missing? Courage, honesty, integrity, a willingness to say and do unpopular things, the ability to go against groupthink. Those are not qualities traditionally associated with politicians anywhere.
what planet are these commentators on ?
How would Dave had handled it ?
”Hi Dave , Klaus here,. We’re going to hit the resit button , you know what to do right ?”
”Hi Klaus , yeah no problem, we have to keep the plebs in line, they’ve had it coming to them for years , it’s for their own good “
How would Fatso handle it ?
”Hi Boris , Klaus here……..”
What kind of arcane ecumenical partisan BS is this? It’s the kind of political self-pleasuring (to use a polite term) and level of discourse and analysis that you leave behind in the second year of university.
Two shades of effing globalist blue.
“When Boris met Dave” is worth watching, if only to see ‘James Delingpole’ skipping along holding a Teddy Bear.
I agree. It’s brilliant!
Cameron? Get real for heaven’s sake! If you wanted a leader with balls then you’d have to go back to Thatcher.
Correct. In fact did she not say “No, No, No”? Something we should have said on 23rd March 2020 and indeed should still be saying now, all day, everyday until this nonsense ends.
Would Cameron been better than the fat pig dictator? Toby, four monkeys on typewriters would have been better than your mate, the most useless prime minister in history.
Quite possible that Cameron, harder working, mor focussed, would have screwed us all even more effectively.
Cameron was the establishment toad that forged the British government alliance with Gates and GAVI in 2011 – this is central to the present project as Johnson’s speeches make clear:
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/prime-ministers-speech-to-un-general-assembly-26-september-2020
https://www.ageofautism.com/2020/06/british-prime-minister-channels-churchill-as-he-surrenders-to-gates-and-the-vaccine-cartel.html
This is not to say it would have been different with any of our Prime Ministers going back to Major, but the fact is that Cameron has been only conspicuous by his attempt to exploit our problems for his own benefit, rather than expressing any analytic insight into the government’s failings. Further, Cameron’s maladroit handling of Brexit demonstrated his essential political opportunism and cowardice.
No, he’d have signed up to the EU debacle. Nuff said.
Cameron would have been just as bad as Boris, plus we’d still be in the EU.
I remember being disturbed the first time I ever saw Johnson – it was a TV interview c1986 when he was President of the Oxford Union. I cannot remember the precise context but what I had never encountered before was an establishment person declare their sense of their own entitlement in such a way: it ought to have been a career suicide note – you obviously could not go round saying things like that, but also you were left with the bad taste feeling that that was how people of his sort really did think but didn’t say. I suppose what he had in the Brexit debacle was more nerve than any other parliamentary politician – indeed, the absolute failure of everyone else should be the subject of rigorous analysis. His other distinction was being able to charm the rank and file members of the party and delude them that they were important and that he spoke for them, when manifestly he could not have cared less. But of course the present political failure is collective: there was no one ready to counter the globalist coup, and even Lockdown Sceptics have been in denial about this, at least till recently.
Don’t know what happened to you guys because you should not have died within 28 days crap in quotes because surely there can be no serious argument about that and btw it’s now 60 days, because that IS crap.
OK, I’ve not read the piece in its entirety but let me say this: As a counterfactual statement of how things could have been done better, it’s probably a good summary. Whether Cameron specifically would have done better than Johnson I don’t know. My opinion of Cameron is also pretty low – I see him as one of a series of steadily declining PMs starting from Major onwards. Johnson, May, Cameron are all so low and loathsome that deciding who is less competent than whom becomes the sort of conversation best had while drunk after the pubs have shut and the remains of the Chinese takeaway are congealing on the carpet.
That the Conservative Party could have thrown up all three of them is amazing and that the British were saddled with them is a sad comment on our electoral system. All three basically got in because they were not someone else (Brown, anyone/Corbyn, May/Corbyn). Their only real achievement has been to get us out of the EU, sort of. And even that was a mistake in the opinion of two of them. Johnson has produced a startling result with the vaccine programme but has messed up the rest of the Covid response so badly that I can see few circumstances in which I could vote for his party ever again and certainly not for him. I am discounting Brexit because of Northern Ireland.
I’d be more interested in an article along similar lines but instead asking whether a Jeremy Corbyn victory at the 2019 General Election would’ve been better for the country regarding the handling of the Covid crisis…