Phillip Blond, David Cameron and the Big Society: Just how red will the Tories be?
James Crabtree
Will Dave and Phillip's marriage last?
I just got back to Prospect HQ, having spent a chunk of the morning at the launch of Phillip Blond’s new think tank, Respublica. It was an at once impressive and odd occasion. Held in a cavernous basement chamber with high vaulted ceilings in a plush hotel just off Whitehall, the event had something of the air of a wedding about it. David Cameron, the awaited guest, was late. Blond waited nervously by the entrance, elegantly besuited and looking just a touch nervous that his intended might jilt him at the last—a worry perhaps given a small bit of extra edge by a story in yesterday’s Times in which Cameron seemed to distance himself slightly, if only under pressure from business spokesman Ken Clarke. But he need not have worried. A flunky coughed into the microphone (the policy equivalent of “please be upstanding”), Cameron duly arrived, and David and Phillip walked down the aisle in front of around three hundred admirers—publicly sealing the marriage of the Cameroon and the Red Tory projects.
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