It’s an important question that Stephen Glover asks in a very good column in the Daily Mail. If nothing else, it looks like Cameron’s been taking some tips from Obama on foreign policy:
Twice in the past week David Cameron has opened his mouth and said things which would have appalled me had they come from a diehard socialist leader. Could a true Tory really have spoken in this way?
When he was in Pakistan he appeared to say that Britain was responsible for ‘so many of the world’s problems’. Sensible Tories are proud rather than ashamed of the British Empire, though of course bad things happened. It is also an established convention that prime ministers do not run down this country while abroad.
Then, earlier this week, Mr Cameron let fly at Oxford University for admitting only one black student in 2009. It turns out he was wrong about his figures: there were 41 black or mixed race students.
He continues:
This is my question, which I am trying to ask as calmly as I can. How can a Tory Prime Minister, who is an intelligent and knowledgeable person, make such a preposterously inaccurate statement, which might have fallen naturally from the lips of a Left-wing student leader? How could he have spoken of Britain’s imperial past in such a cruelly dismissive way?