PM: ‘Come Dine with me’ Cameron’s authority on the wane?

Are Cameron’s political fortunes beginning to wane? The difficulty and unpoluarity in passing the Health and Social Care Act 2012 , Osborne’s budget, the Craddus affair involving for ‘Cash for Access’ at No. 10, the leak of the controversial ‘NHS Risk Register’ document the and the shambles over petrol in the face of a possible strike by tanker drivers have all added up to tarnish Cameron’s authority.

Cameron’s tendency to rely on a small clique of trusted confidants, instead of the Tory Party as whole has seen David Cameron’s Coalition, his leadership ability and his choice of associates have taken something of a political kicking.

Two interesting articles to follow up on this: 1. Daily Mail’s The knives are out for David Cameron. He should watch his back Which includes the line:‘In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way’.

1. Peter Oborne in The Telegraph: The Conservative Party can save Cameron, but only if he lets it. Which asserts:The Prime Minister’s proxies and cronies must go if he is to re-establish confidence.

The article starts:For many governments there comes a desperately sad moment after which nothing is ever quite the same again, when trust and confidence evaporates and all that remains is a long battle of attrition. For Harold Wilson, that moment struck with the devaluation crisis of 1967; for John Major, it was Black Wednesday in 1992. Tony Blair’s came with the realisation that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction and that his casus belli for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a lie. There is now a strong possibility that historians will identify the events of the past two weeks – the lethal combination of George Osborne’s shambolic Budget with the shocking revelation that access to the Prime Minister and government policy is up for sale – as the climacteric of the Cameron/Clegg Coalition.

Oborne puts this reverse in the PM’s fortunes down to:There are only two reasons for the collapse of this Government’s fortunes: the first is Cameron and Osborne; the second is the decision made in 2005, when Cameron was elected leader, to govern as much as possible without the Conservative Party.