Cameron, the Napoleonic Sheep

(Getty Images)

Bruce Anderson had a brilliant column in the Daily Telegraph yesterday. He still supports David Cameron’s policies, but seems to have lost patience with the politician, who “has spent a lot of time reminding hungry sheep about the price of grass”.

Anderson divides prime ministers into rationalists and demiurges, or boring administrators and leaders “whose force of personality requires a vast field of action to express itself and can work wonders on the public psyche”. Category A includes Attlee, Home, Callaghan and Major; category B Churchill, Thatcher and Blair; while “Eden, Macmillan and Brown were too complex to be classifiable”.

Cameron, he implies, is heading for classification in the rationalist, boring category.

What a disillusionment this is. For it was Anderson who wrote on 30 January 2006, the month after Cameron’s election as Conservative Party leader: “No politician since Napoleon has had such a dramatic impact so quickly.”

How the mighty are fallen, and their great historical allusions with them.

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• pfbulmer

  David Cameron is a complete and utter disappointment !

  Many had great hopes for him but unfortunately he has turned out to be lacking in basic common sense, to a degree that no one could have suspected or even thought possible. .

  It turns out that he has spent most of his life and rehearsing and recording what he was going to say and do in order to become Prime Minister as he always thought he would make a good PM but very little time on deciding what he was going to do, and say when he actually became Prime Minister !

  The only amazing thing he has done is to have lasted so long and that has been due to the even greater stupidity of his own party !

• porkfright

  A Mike and Bernie Winters reference-this is getting better all the time!

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