Further to the two articles written on the topic, in addition to my own on the reluctance of both the far-right and left to engage in their usual shared and favourite hobby of aiming cynical, disdainful screeds at popular mainstream politicians, I have the following to add:

American politics has a tendency to lead Britain’s. The rise of the New Right admittedly occurred here before it did there in terms of political success but from Major’s embrace of the consumer model for public services as suggested by neo-liberals to triangulation  obviously informing the Third Way to Blair’s later and whole-hearted embrace of at least the democratic revolutionary elements of Neoconservatism Britain has followed America’s lead.

This is far more rational than it is craven. It stands in union with empiricism to observe what has proven successful in a country far larger than your own and then attempt to apply it to our small island. If anything can bring together so immense and ideologically oxymoronic a nation as America {that only a fool would attempt to apply a blanket statement towards, except for to say that it is so torn it defies any assumption} then it is a matter of ease to apply it here. This form of borrowing of strategy and method is what allowed Blair to use much the same message that allowed Clinton to triumph in a general election to bring the Labour Party such a landslide as to crush the Conservatives to messes for nearly a decade.

In seemed likely that Cameron was attempting to follow this recent tradition through his espousal of what could only be described as Compassionate Conservatism, a rather inherently contradictory variety of the philosophy adopted by Bush and then abandoned, undeveloped and unloved, shortly after reaching power in favour of tax cuts for the  extremely wealthy, Neoconservative myth-craft and The Politics of Fear.

However Bush has become an increasingly unfavourable model to follow, especially seeing as the fashion in which Rove brought together the unsustainably broad church of the right seems to be less a fusion and more a crude stitching, now resulting in the aberrant hybrid beast tearing itself free from itself, messily.

And so we now witness the spectacle before us. When someone can cause both much of the hard right and left to suspend their immutable fury you know that you witnessing something rare. When a first-term Senator has caused both the Prime Minister {who is of a party that has been in power for over a decade} and leader of the opposition {who leads a party called Conservative} to embrace an agenda marked “Change”, to engage in an act of obvious mimickry before the mimicked has even been elected, before his means have even been demonstrated a success, then you know that you are witnessing something vast.