Cameron student photo is banned
This is a painting of a photograph that I can only assume David Cameron doesn't want you to see. The photograph was widely published two weeks ago, around about the time that it was revealed that Cameron took drugs whilst at Eton.
He's the twat standing second from the left.
I personally thought the photograph far more damaging than the drug allegations, as it revealed Cameron as a member of an elitist upper class, resplendent in his £1,000 uniform of blue tie, tails and biscuit-coloured waistcoat. It's an image that Cameron has been at pains to play down, now portraying himself as a "green" cyclist and environmentalist. The new face of the Tory party.
This photograph was taken in 1986 whilst he was a member of the elite Oxford Bullingdon Club.
The Bullingdon Club is famed for its hard drinking and bad behaviour, and Mr Cameron has always refused to talk about it.
Its public school members have become notorious over the years for vandalising restaurants and trashing students' rooms.
Well, it appears that the photographer - for reasons best known to himself - has come to the same conclusion as Cameron, as he has now banned anyone from publishing the picture, which is why BBC's Newsnight has commissioned this painting.
Labour have so far made little use of the photograph, almost certainly because Tony Blair is also the product of a private education, but this is thought likely to change when Gordon Brown takes over as Prime Minister.
Indeed, Blair even has his own embarrassing picture:
He's the twat standing third from the right pretending to be masturbating.The Tory Party fear that Labour may make use of the Cameron picture once Blair has stepped down.
Speaking on Wednesday, in an interview about e-democracy, Tim Montgomerie, editor of the influential Conservative Home website and former chief of staff to Iain Duncan Smith, said the Bullingdon picture was potentially powerful ammunition for Mr Cameron's political opponents.
"Labour must use it in their next election campaign," he told the BBC News website.
American readers will no doubt find this British obsession with class very strange. However, there are historical reasons, unique to the UK, for why this stuff matters.
The British adored their landed gentry and considered it a pleasure to be ruled by them until the Second World War brought the working class into actual contact with their supposed "betters".
The meeting of the two classes was to have a resounding effect on the way Britain would, in future, be ruled. My grandfather talked of the profound shock of finding that the officers - almost all of whom were recruited from the upper echelons of society - were, in actuality, rather dim. And, in the life and death situation of war, this finding was to remove forever the forelock tugging attitude that the working class had traditionally exhibited towards their "betters".
The upper class never recovered from the battering their image took during WWII and political leaders in the UK have spent all their time since insisting on their "man of the people" credentials. It's why Thatcher took so much pleasure in telling us she was just a grocer's daughter from Grantham.
The dichotomy of Blair's public school image and the fact that he leads the Labour Party has been largely ignored by the public; indeed, in some ways it actually helped him as it was presumed that he couldn't be "too left wing" coming from such a background. (He has not disappointed.) Indeed, his background was taken as the proof that Labour had changed from the party that delivered the winter of discontent.
However, Cameron's background has different connotations when one considers that the new face of the reborn Tory Party is yet another old Etonian. That doesn't seem like a new face for the Tory Party at all, that seems like a resumption of the bad old days when upper class patricians told the rest of us what was good for us.
For this reason Cameron and the Tories must have been anxious to take this picture out of circulation. And now the photographer has obliged. Although I am sure the Tory Party and Mr Cameron had nothing to do with that. Honestly. Nothing at all...
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