He warrants better reporting

On the Daily Politics programme yesterday Andrew Neil said that David Cameron was about to make a major speech. I looked for reports of the speech on news bulletins later in the day, but nothing (eventually I saw a small report on page 9 of today’s Guardian). If David Cameron is the British Obama (and there are serious grounds, in terms of image and expectation, for thinking he is) then surely he warrants better reporting than this?

At lunchtime I watched Prime Minister’s Questions (it’s part of the Andrew Neil show which starts at 11.30 on Wednesdays).

I was impressed this week by David Cameron, who raised the issue of MP’s expenses and allowances. This has been such a verboten subject in the House of Commons (in public) that I was amazed that he should get up and ask the Prime Minister face to face about it (effectively putting Gordon Brown on the spot - the Prime Minster’s response was lacklustre: “We voted to refer it to a committee”). The Labour backbenches jeered much more than they usually jeer, although I am not sure why (possibly they wanted the conspiracy of silence to continue).

Considering that Derek Conway was (at the time) a Tory MP and that the old Tory Sleaze accusations could have blown up again, David Cameron has handled the issue in an expert and competent way. Not only has he cut Derek Conway off completely, he has made the Conservatives synonymous with “best practice” on the issue of transparency and disclosure. And today he turned the issue onto the Labour government so that it looked as if they were the ones who were dragging their feet / refusing to show leadership.