For us, David Cameron sounded his own death knell as a politician when he walked away from the Tory commitment to repatriate the fishing policy. That was the litmus test, and The Boy failed it.

Dislike was quickly followed by detestation but neither sentiment was shared by The Failygraph. It decided it was in love with The Boy. Starting the first full year of his reign as Tory party leader, in January 2006, we were thus treated by a long series of articles, stretching over the years, most of which, if not overtly complimentary, were generally supportive.

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And Cameron doesn't even have an election win to fall back on, despite the open goal that presented itself

I would not trust a rebranded europlastic Tory Party. They'll talk the talk but skip the walk.
If the Tories don't split they'll shatter.

Are there any "tories" left? I just wondered, that's all!

No. There are plenty of muppets in the Tory Party.

For all Cameron's faults he is lucky as he is up against an even worse failure in Millband and the Labour party...as the Bradford bye election proved.Time for a third party or independents to step into the vacuum maybe?there does see plenty disillusion with both the Coalition and Labour at the moment...is this permanent or will the electorate revert back to type come another election?..probably a bit of both....but it is encouraging that the usual political powers seem to have been shaken at the foundations.

Here is one person who is no longer a Tory! I did not renew my membership when it ran out last year....but I still receive emails and other correspondence from them. I delete the emails and glance over the correspondence and then bin it. In my area, it will always be LD or Tory. They are like children between each other - LDs said this/Tories said that. I know that many people just are not interested.

That is all.

The 'cash-for-access' scandal finally did for Cameron's reputation, & the bizarre 'pasties-&-pensions' budget did the same for Osborne's. Up till then, there was just the glimmer of hope that together they would somehow see sense at last. But these two events, reinforced by Francis Maude's inept comments recently about jerry-cans, have in my opinion, sealed the fate of the Cameron/Osborne Tory leftist clique.

It can only be a matter of time - perhaps only weeks now, rather than months. A backbench revolt over the ultra-irrelevant gay marriage issue, internet surveillance, another deportation failure because of a terrorist's or foreign-born criminal's so-called human rights, or even a rejection of all or major parts of the budget etc, could all bring Cameron's cronies down. It only takes 15% of the Tory Parliamentary party - ie 46 Tory MPs - to make the request for a leadership confidence motion, & for a leadership challenge to then begin.

Gove has said he wants to stay at Education to see all his intended reforms put into place. But as PM he can insist his Education ministers continue to complete his earlier work. Similarly David Davis has been making regular speeches lately espousing noticeably different views from the approved Cameron line. Perhaps the challenge has already begun!

Watchet

The time for Cameron and Osbourne to make swinging changes that would bear fruit was June 2010. But they blew the election due to Cameron's woolly renewal bullocks and got into bed with the Lib Dems who's competence on anything to do with the economy is worse even than Labours.

The only matter that was always going to occupy the political space for ordinary voters during this parliament was the economy. All other issues don't matter if you have no job and/or no money, and yet many people with jobs are finding themselves worse off than they have ever been in living memory. But to keep all the un-realists on board the Tories have dodged the real issues and got bogged down in trivia.

Cameron has been handed everything on a plate. A completely clueless and incompetent Labour party with a dysfunctional leader. Yet he lost the election. He has been handed on a plate 2 forms of energy that would make the UK almost self sufficient. Both were well known well before the election. Shale gas and MSTR, or Thorium reactors. He has even been handed a third favour on a plate, an even more incompetent muppet as leader of the opposition who was responsible for much of the economic carnage with his climate change bill.

Yet can there have been a more useless and incompetent government than the current Tory/Lib-Dem coalition, ever? Often you hope to have one thing handed to you on a plate and using it to your advantage. But to blow three!!!! Where are the long knives of the 1922 committee?

All that will happen now is Labour will come back to power, do a sneaky financial deal with the EU embedding us further, but allowing them to claim some financial favour, and use the revenue from the Gas (that they will claim was not know to them, an easy task when Cameron ignored it) that will be just coming on stream to cut Taxes and please the stupid. They will then squeeze the productive side of the economy again to redistribute wealth and expand the public sector.

This is what happens when you listen to focus groups and ignore the wider electorate.

I agree. It's almost impossible to imagine how they could be so clueless . . .

What I find interesting is that the conservatives received fewer votes in 2010 than at any time in a conservative general election victory since 1924 (four years before the Representation of the People Act 1928 which extended the voting franchise to all women over the age of 21). They also garnered significantly less as a percentage of the electorate than in ANY previous conservative victory (and amazingly, even less than the percentage they received when losing to labour in 1945).

I seem to recall that we were leaders in the technology of thorium nuclear reactors but for want of a continuance of government funding (which I seem to recall totalled £2billion- or what our debt grows by each week) the research programme was ended.

This is not quite right though. His brother was running DEFRA when the private member's bill (drafted by FoE) was put before parliament for its first reading but this bill would have got absolutely nowhere had it not been for the explicit support of the leader of her Majesty's opposition, one David Cameron.

check this out: -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3xseCcfMZY

I didn't read it that way. For me, Cameron revealed himself as a creature of the tranzies pre-election. Lisbon - over 80% wanted a referendum. The information was in the press, they didn't even need a focus group. Not hedging his bets on AGW when he had the CRU revelations to hand. Not betraying the narrative was more important to him than winning the election.

Which project are you thinking of ? Some thorium fuel irradiation tests were done at Dragon (a UK based european project) but I'm not sure that would qualify us as "leaders".

Dunno. Read about it a couple of years ago. The report was alongside a picture of two British scientists standing inside a newly built mini particle accelerator.

I'll try to dig it out

edit . . .

and no, it wasn't the Dragon project

OK, I think I remember it too. Probably it was discussed on the forum. As it involved particle accelerators, IMO it's blue sky R&D, as far as a viable reactor design goes.