One of the things that has kept some solid conservatives in the UK quiet during David Cameron’s move to the political center is the belief that the move will attract voters (and maybe some MPs) to the party from the Liberal Democrats. As I suggested previously, Cameron’s strategy could be seen as an assassination attempt on the Liberal Democrat party. The Liberal Democrats are doing their best to aid the strategy. After the forced departure of former leader Charles Kennedy over his admitted alcohol problem, the grandee most thought would replace him was destroyed by Tony Blair in his first appearence at Prime Minister’s Questions as acting leader. Then the most rightish-leaning candidate to replace him had to drop out of the race after revelations of an affair with a male prostitute (or ‘rent boy’ as the English papers put it). The most popular candidate with ordinary Lib Dem supporters, Simon Hughes, has now admitted to having homosexual experiences in the past, which is all rather ironic as he only got into Parliament in the first place because Labour voters in the 80s rebelled at the prospect of voting for openly gay candidate Peter Tatchell (and the Hughes campaign portrayed him, I kid you not, as ‘the straight choice’.)

So with the Parliamentary Lib Dems falling apart, it is unsurprising that their support in the polls is plummeting too. However, the deserting supporters are going to Labour, not the Conservatives. In yet another facet of a political landscape swathed in irony, aggressively positioning the Conservative Party in the political center appears only to have put them behind the Labour Party again.

The opportunity here, as I suggested in that previous post, is that a return to a two-party system will allow voters to make, dare I say it, a straight choice between two competing ideologies without the option of a fudged vote in the form of a Liberal Democrat party that no-one knows what it stands for. Needless to say, that would require Conservative policies to be based in the long tradition of Conservative thought, which at the moment, regrettably, they are not.