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Dave The Rave

by | 5th, October 2005

‘SHOULD we start calling David Cameron, the Tory leadership contender, Dave?

Impersonation! Impersonation! Impersonation!

Young, with a young wife and a young family, Dave looks very much like the Tories’ own Tony. Just look at those hand gestures, as spotted by the Times.

He might have echoed Margaret Thatcher in his words with his talk of “no turning back”, as the Times says, but the fists, the pointing fingers and the earnest eyes give him the look of a taller Blair.

“If we have the courage to grab [this message] the bravery to fight for it…nothing and no one will stop us,” said Cameron as he addressed the Tory faithful in Blackpool yesterday.

And he gets the Times’s “Jury” vote. The paper has invited a loose assortment of Tories to chew over the evidence and give their verdicts on what occurs at conference each day.

And such is the way of football players’ ratings in the sports pages, Cameron is given a score. He gets 7.5 out of ten. Far from perfect, but better by 0.5 of a point than Kenneth Clarke, the big beast of the party who also addressed the crowd yesterday.

Politics has already been reduced to sound-bites, so why not distil those lengthy and dull speeches a bit more and just given them scores out of ten.

“Martin Luther King gave a 9/10 performance yesterday,” writes the Washington Post. “Winston Churchill scored a 9.995,” reports the Mail. “And in improving his oratory by standing on a stage mute for a full ten minutes, George Dubya Bush became the Nadia Comaneci of the political scene with a perfect 10,” says the Texas Lone Star Iconoclast.

The Telegraph spots the potential in turning politics into a sport, but instead of scores uses a league table.

In “WHO’S UP, WHO’S DOWN”, the paper lists a few Tories and alongside each of the names places a little arrow, pointing up for good and down for bad.

Top of the table is the Tory’s very own Chelsea Blue, the aforesaid Cameron. He’s “the youthful darling of the Notting Hill modernisers”, says the programme notes. And what’s more, his speech earned him a decibel rating of 92.

That’s better than Kenneth Clarke, also on the up, whose “joke-packed” conference speech received a 91.8 decibel standing ovation. Both boys done good, but both fall short of the 93.5 decibels their agonist Malcolm Rifkind scored for his address.

But perhaps they should all be worried. We aren’t offered a decibel count for the noise made when Derek Laud left the Big Brother house earlier this year, but the Telegraph says the former Tory speech writer is the person visitors to a new politics website want to lead the party.

The arrow alongside the name of the gay, black Tory is pointing excitedly up. Like Cameron’s fingers…’



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