The Spectator’s Fraser Nelson is a must-read.

Some extracts:

This is not the first time Cameron has conjured up an historic defeat from nowhere. Remember the Health Bill? The 2012 Budget? The U-turns? You could add the general election campaign, perhaps the biggest self-inflicted wound of all. The Syria vote fits a trend . . .
Cameron can be forgiven for failing to win around Ed Miliband. The worse offence is misjudging the mood of his own party, wrongly thinking they’d back him…
The Cameron operation tends to spring ideas on a surprised party: the Big Society, the need for radical NHS reform, the pasty tax and gay marriage, not mentioned in its lengthy manifesto. This is because the Cameron operation itself arrives at ideas very late and seldom plans more than 48 hours in advance. Contrast this with successful health and welfare reform: agendas drawn up years in advance, carried out with radicalism but plenty explanation and helped by a coalition of supporters….
Those around Cameron hate admitting to bungling things, which is why they keep doing so. But they should be careful about blaming parliament – or, worse, the public – for this. Lord Finkelstein says in today’s Times that “the position we have taken for 75 years no longer enjoys popular support and confidence… we have woken up to a different country.” I’m not so sure. We have woken up to the same country where, not so long ago, regime change in Libya was backed by the public and Parliament (by 557 votes to 13) which was convinced by Cameron’s plan to depose a dictator. But Britain has learned, after Afghanistan and Iraq, that the case for war and what follows needs to be carefully thought-through. This one just wasn’t.
And if the Cameroons believe so fervently in Britain’s stature being affected by the ability to deploy military force, then maybe they should have thought twice before cutting the defence budget and while stuffing DFID [overseas aid] like a foie gras duck.

Meanwhile, the Davos liberals over at The Economist rage, with the magazine’s Blighty blog attacking the British vote as “shocking” (which it was) and “shaming” (which it was not).

The penultimate paragraph of the post, condescending, supranationalist and profoundly misleading, is an almost classic example of the sort of thinking that got Cameron in the mess in which he now finds himself:

…Those who deserve the greatest opprobrium are the 30 Tory MPs who voted against their prime minister and a still larger group (including, it is said, more than one cabinet minister) who signalled only reluctant support for Mr Cameron. Increasingly, there is a tendency within the Conservative Party that takes such a narrow, Poujadist (or should that be Farageist?) view of national interest that it behaves as if Britain should cease to have any serious engagement with the outside world. It was no coincidence that some of the rebels are also among the party’s most Europhobic headbangers. They seem to care as little for the Atlantic partnership and NATO as they do for the European Union. They claim to be representing popular opinion, which is indeed weary of foreign wars and sceptical about the reasons for Britain’s involvement in them. But not even populist Tories should want foreign policy to be determined by opinion polls.

Popular consent: What a simply frightful idea . . .