Do The Donald and The Unspeakable Pence and all the others have any glimmering that they're asses?

Last Tango in Halifax's Alan and Celia: Below, normally
soft-spoken Alan shares a striking political insight.

In Series 1 of Last Tango in Halifax, Alan Buttershaw (Derek Jacobi) and Celia Dawson (Anne Reid), both now widowed, had refound each other after 70 years without contact and, discovering that they were both still madly infatuated, and considering their advanced age, hatched a plan to just go ahead and get married. Of course in most ways they hardly knew each other, and in this exchange from Episode 3, which aired originally in December 2012, they fell afoul of each other's politics. (Like all 17 other episodes to date, this one was written by series creator Sally Wainwright.)

CELIA: D'you know, I'd never had you down for red-hot Labour.
ALAN [trying to say something]: Hmm --
CELIA: I thought you had more about you.
ALAN: You know, the good thing about David Cameron is that even he knows he's an ass. You know, every time he opens his mouth, you can see him thinking, "I was born an ass, I'll die an ass, but at least I know I'm an ass."

by Ken

Okay, this post is mostly an excuse to do something with this delicious rant of Alan's -- a soft-spoken rant, of course, because Alan is almost always soft-spoken, but a rant nevertheless. At the same time, I think it has some significant resonance, not just in more recent British politics, but in our own as well.

After all, the condition of having been born an ass and being destined to die an ass isn't exactly unknown on our side of the pond. What's rare -- on both sides -- is this quality that Alan attributes to the now-unlamented David Cameron: knowing that he is one. To pick a random example, do you suppose that The Donald has even a glimmering? Or his anointed running mate, The Unspeakable Pence? Or, for that matter, many of their fellow pols and the pundits who provide sideline chatter?

In The Donald's case, I think there really are moments when he knows he's being a buffoon, sometimes for entertainment purposes and sometimes in the hope of attracting favorable attention from potential voters he thinks are buffoons. Within a certain range, we have to remember, the man knows how to play an audience.

And so, in a season of almost nothing but political insanities, should I really have done a double take upon sight of this item in yesterday's nytimes.com "FirstDraft"?

But seriously now, Donald Trump attracting contributions from small donors sufficient to seriously alter his campaign-finance situation? People giving money to Donald Trump just for being Donald Trump??? Am I missing something here?

Do I have to add that I didn't pursue that link? (And I haven't given it to you as a link. If you really want to find it, you can do that via nytimes.com.) From the same source, I didn't pursue this link either:

Well now, isn't this a surprise?

Of course there's nothing I see that can be done about it, beyond recognizing that this is where the country is in the year 2016 -- something that isn't likely to be magically changed by the election, whatever the outcome. The disaffection that's driving the would-be Trump voters is real, and as Ian Welsh has been pointing out, when people in desperate need of change come to the determination that no hope of change is to be entertained from any of the existing players, it's not surprising that they may grasp at any straw advanced toward them without intensive scrutiny of the source.

And if they've fixed their hopes on The Donald as their "breath of fresh air," are they likely to be persuaded otherwise even by an episode as egregious as their boy's utterly astonishing response to the DNC appearance by the parents of Capt. Humayun Khan? Aren't we already seeing even loonier responses by the Trump faithful: that it's all a plant by anti-Trump Dems, very likely in cahoots with the Muslim Brotherhood. It's kind of hard to argue rationally against hopes that have no toehold in reason. (And Democrats might be in a better position to address them if they had made any serious attempt to make government work for any segment of the country other than the 1% and their cadres of hangers-on.)

Nevertheless, for those of us who try to dwell in the domain of reason, or at least try to make regular visits, the stuff that's come out of the mouths of many of the political participants is eye-popping. Like that of the aforementioned Unspeakable Pence, who apparently thought he could paper over the problem with his running mate by offering mouth honor to the heroic captain and his family and laying all the blame on (who else?) President Obama. (This was dealt with nicely by Teacherken in a Daily Kos post, "Pence responds on Capt. Khan - if you can stomach it.")

Of course, as all sorts of folks in the reasoning world have pointed out, Captain Khan's killing can't have had anything to do with Obama or Hillary Clinton since it occurred in 2004 -- in other words, during the first term of Chimpy the Prez Bush, amid the insanity created there by his invasion.

And in the Unspeakable's official statement, in the sentence "Due to the disastrous decisions of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, a once stable Middle East has now been overrun by ISIS," beyond the lesser delusions embodied, there is the one that at some point in the rememberable past there was such a thing as a "stable Middle East." This represents a level of ignorance and dishonesty that seems to cross some sort of line as to what ought to be permissible. It certainly boggles my mind, which is no longer easily boggled. Unfortunately, our system doesn't allow us any way to define "what ought to be permissible" in political discourse.

At the same time, it's possible for the level of political discourse to descend so low that I find myself passing along a Washington Post column by the normally appalling "Chucky the Hammer" Krauthammer. It's called "Donald Trump and the fitness threshold," though I note in this link to the NY Daily News version that to the original title they added, not inappropriately: "He craves not only validation but adoration." I can't believe I'm saying it about anything penned by Chucky, but -- while it's not the whole story about Trump (it doesn't account for the undeniable success he's had carving out that peculiar but undeniable position he's created for himself), but it's worth a read. Here's the basic premise, jumping off from the candidate's seemingly unaccountable blunder in attacking a Gold Star Family.

Why did Trump do it? It wasn’t a mistake. It was a revelation. It’s that he can’t help himself. His governing rule in life is to strike back when attacked, disrespected or even slighted. To understand Trump, you have to grasp the General Theory: He judges every action, every pronouncement, every person by a single criterion — whether or not it/he is “nice” to Trump. . . .

This is beyond narcissism. I used to think Trump was an 11-year-old, an undeveloped schoolyard bully. I was off by about 10 years. His needs are more primitive, an infantile hunger for approval and praise, a craving that can never be satisfied. He lives in a cocoon of solipsism where the world outside himself has value — indeed exists — only insofar as it sustains and inflates him.

Most politicians seek approval. But Trump lives for the adoration. He doesn’t even try to hide it, boasting incessantly about his crowds, his standing ovations, his TV ratings, his poll numbers, his primary victories. The latter are most prized because they offer empirical evidence of how loved and admired he is.

Prized also because, in our politics, success is self-validating. A candidacy that started out as a joke, as a self-aggrandizing exercise in xenophobia, struck a chord in a certain constituency and took off. The joke was on those who believed that he was not a serious man and therefore would not be taken seriously. They — myself emphatically included — were wrong.

POSTSCRIPT: AREN'T WE ALL GONNA MISS CIVILIZATION, WALLY?

DILBERT     by Scott Adams
Drone Defense System

[Click to enlarge.]

#

Ever Watch A British Parliamentary Debate? The Beast Of Bolsover vs Dodgy Dave

When I was spending a lot of time in London on business for a few years, a friend of a friend was a Member of Parliament-- a gay Tory-- and he offered to take me to lunch in the Members dining room one day with the option of sitting in the visitors' gallery and hearing a debate. I gladly accepted .The day we picked just happened to turn out to be the day Margaret Thatcher decided to go join George H.W. Bush and go to war against Iraq. It wasn't a very lively debate and there was a sense of unrealness about what was-- in retrospect at least, being launched. One of the Members opposing Thatcher was Dennis Skinner., not a favorite of my host it turns out. Lunch, afterwards, though was very nice. Skinner, I was told, never eats in the Members dining room.

This week's debate over the Panama Papers was somewhat more exciting. That's when the same Dennis Skinner, a former coal miner and a Labour MP since 1970 (from Bolster in Derbyshire)-- affectionately known to his colleagues and constituents as "The Beast of Bolsover"-- caused quite a stir and got himself ejected from the House for the day.

Although most Americans who know of Skinner at all, know him as one of the PMs who was behind Jeremy Corbyn when he was overthrowing the New Labour dominance of the party, Brits still remember that Skinner, an outspoken anti-monarchist, had used the floor of Parliament to expose Thatcher for bribing judges in 1984 and, in 2005, referring to the Conservatives' economic record under Thatcher as a time when "the only thing that was growing then were the lines of coke in front of Boy George and the rest of the Tories." He was ejected from Parliament for those statements-- and quite a few others.

When Paul Ryan was dividing up Americans as "makers" & "takers," David Cameron was using the same kind of right-wing divisiveness to categorize Brits as "strivers" & "scroungers." Monday, Skinner, during a debate on the Panama Papers and the role of the Cameron family in the corruption, called the Prime Minister, "Dodgy Dave," which didn't go over well among the Conservatives, where the epithet struck a raw nerve. Under unparliamentary language rules, no MP is allowed to accuse another member of being dishonorable and "dodgy" would imply Cameron is a crook who was avoiding paying taxes by stashing wealth overseas. Cameron's defenders are also using name-calling to cloud the debate. Yesterday, Sir Alan Duncan, the Conservative MP for Rutland and Melton called working people who criticize Cameron for being a crook jealous "low achievers." He sounds very much like a Republican:

Paul and Dodgy Dave

"Shouldn't the Prime Minister's critics really just snap out of the synthetic indignation and admit that their real point is that they hate anyone who has got a hint of wealth in them? May I support the Prime Minister in fending off those who are attacking him, particularly in thinking of this place, because if he doesn't, we risk seeing a House of Commons which is stuffed full of low-achievers who hate enterprise, hate people who look after their own family and know absolutely nothing about the outside world."

He wasn't ejected from the Chamber but the debate over the Panama Papers is heating up worldwide-- and just as the U.S. confronts the latest slap on the wrist towards the bankster criminals at Goldman Sachs. No one gets blamed and no one is accused on anything. It's as though the entity "Goldman Sachs" did something complicated-- but without motivation-- illegal and will be asked to pay a fine, though not even close to the $5.06 billion being deceptively ballyhooed by the government in the media. The firm-- not individuals, apparently-- created and sold packages of shoddy mortgages to investors, one of the primary causes leading up to the near collapse of the world economy and siphoning billions of dollars from Americans' savings. The Washington Post reported that "advocacy groups quickly pounced on the deal as too lenient, noting that the $5 billion settlement is dwarfed by Goldman Sach’s recent profits. Also, they note, Goldman Sachs will be be able to deduct some of the cost of the settlement from its taxes. 'That is not justice,' said Dennis Kelleher, president and chief executive of Better Markets. 'Every single individual at Goldman who received a bonus from this illegal conduct not only keeps the entire bonus, but suffers no penalty at all.'" I'm sure that will make Obama, Schumer, and Clinton smile with disdain.

Speaking at a rally in Albany, Bernie told supporters that what was being discussed was "fraud" by Goldman Sachs and the inequity-- economic and judicial-- created by a rigged economy. "This is the system we are living in and this is the system we have to change. Goldman Sachs is one of the major financial institutions in our country... What they have just acknowledged to the whole world is that their system... is based on fraud." Perhaps this would be a good time for Clinton to release the transcripts of the speeches she gave to Goldman Sachs executives, speeches that gave the company legalistic cover to massively bribe her and her equally corrupt husband. Anyway, back to Dodgy Dave and his own embarrassing corruption exposure.

David Cameron has finally admitted he benefited from a Panama-based offshore trust set up by his late father.

After three days of stalling and four partial statements issued by Downing Street he confessed that he owned shares in the tax haven fund, which he sold for £31,500 just before becoming prime minister in 2010.

In a specially arranged interview with ITV News’ Robert Peston he confirmed a direct link to his father’s UK-tax avoiding fund, details of which were exposed in the Panama Papers revelations in the Guardian this week.

Admitting it had been “a difficult few days”, the prime minister said he held the shares together with his wife, Samantha, from 1997 and during his time as leader of the opposition. They were sold in January 2010 for a profit of £19,000.

He paid income tax on the dividends but there was no capital gains tax payable and he said he sold up before entering Downing Street “because I didn’t want anyone to say you have other agendas or vested interests.”

But the interview appeared unlikely to end scrutiny of Cameron’s tax affairs.

The Labour MP John Mann, a member of the Treasury select committee, said the prime minister should resign, claiming that Cameron had “covered up and misled.”

Cameron also admitted he did not know whether the £300,000 he inherited from his father had benefited from tax haven status due to part of his estate being based in a unit trust in Jersey.

“I obviously can’t point to the source of every bit of money and dad’s not around for me to ask the questions now,” Cameron said.

It was the fifth explanation in four days from Cameron and his aides about the benefits he and his family had enjoyed from the offshore fund.

Downing Street initially insisted it was a private matter, but Cameron then said he had “no shares, no offshore trusts, no offshore funds”. His spokesman later clarified: “The prime minister, his wife and their children do not benefit from any offshore funds.”

Downing Street then said there were no offshore funds or trusts the family would benefit from in future, leaving questions about the past.

In his first interview on the topic after days of stonewalling, Cameron was questioned on whether there was a conflict of interest between his father setting up the Panama-based Blairmore Investment Trust, which did not have to pay UK tax on its profits, and his professed policy to crack down on aggressive tax avoidance.

...Richard Burgon, the shadow Treasury minister, said Cameron’s admission showed a “crisis of morals” at the heart of the Conservative government.

He said: “After four days of refusing to answer this question David Cameron has now finally been forced to admit he directly benefited from Blairmore, a company which paid no tax in 30 years. He must now further clarify whether or not he or his family were benefiting directly or indirectly in 2013 when he was lobbying to prevent EU measures to better regulate trusts as a way to clamp down on tax avoidance.

Don't say no one ever warned you. This is what happens whether you elect conservatives, whether Dodgy Dave in Britain, Paul Ryan in Wisconsin or Hillary Clinton in New York. It's in their political DNA. Wise up; we finally have real choice-- which doesn't happen all that often. After an onslaught from the establishment media, you may not think Bernie's perfect but, there's no getting around it: Hillary and everyone around her just reek of corruption. Support Bernie and the anti-corruption reformers like him who are running for Congress.

Scott Walker-- Caught Lying Again

Scott Walker's entire public career has been founded on flat-out lies and distortions-- and even more so since he became governor of Wisconsin. The Koch brothers' favorite for the GOP presidential nomination was just caught out in another bold-faced lie. It should surprise no one that he tried putting his own degenerate thoughts into the mouth of Britain's Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron. Walker claims Cameron "confided" in him that he thinks Obama is a bad leader. Cameron says Walker is making it up.

Walker, who has taken several trips overseas in recent months to study up on foreign policy in preparation for an all-but-certain presidential bid, told a roomful of Republican donors Friday that world leaders, including Cameron, are worried about the U.S. stepping back in the world. "The Prime Minister did not say that and does not think that," a Downing Street spokesperson told Time.

"I heard that from David Cameron back in February earlier when we were over at 10 Downing," Walker said. "I heard it from other leaders around the world. They’re looking around realizing this lead from behind mentality just doesn’t work. It’s just not working."

His comments came at the E2 Summit hosted by former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in Deer Valley, Utah, where Walker was auditioning for support from some of the Republican Party’s deep-pocketed donors.

Walker and Cameron met Feb. 10 while Walker was traveling on a trade mission for his state. The trip was overshadowed in the U.S. by news coverage of Walker dodging a question on evolution.

Walker’s political office deferred comment to his official office, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Walker has made himself a laughingstock in Europe because of his reactionary utterances and his inability to defend his naive, backward positions when confronted by non-Republicans abroad. Not that Walker is doing that much better back in Wisconsin, from which has has largely absented himself lately. He's been trying to gut public education in his state with draconian budget cuts that no one likes.

One GOP lawmaker has dissed his spending plan as a "crap budget," and it gets worse than merely a rhetorical slap. While Walker has been courting voters, party activists and donors in advance of his expected announcement that he's running for the 2016 party nomination, state GOP lawmakers, in concert with Democrats, have crushed some of his biggest ideas this year.

And that works against one clear advantage governors like Walker can bring to national politics - a record of achievement in public policy that many candidates coming from the Byzantine, often gridlocked chambers of Congress can't match.

Walker played into that theme last week in addressing a Utah retreat held by 2012 nominee Mitt Romney. Walker said flatly of senators in the presidential race: "They have yet to win anything and accomplish anything." That was a dig at Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida, Ted Cruz of Texas and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

In Wisconsin, however, lawmakers voted to restore money the governor wanted to cut for K-12 schools. They rejected his proposed changes to a popular prescription drug program for Medicaid recipients, scrapped a merger of state agencies he wanted and voted against the governor's plan to make the University of Wisconsin system independent of state laws and oversight.

...Now it's a struggle to find agreement on Walker's proposed $1.3 billion in borrowing for roads, likely to be reduced, and a financing plan for a new $500 million arena to keep the Milwaukee Bucks from leaving the state. "We may have a crap budget, but we're going to make it better," freshman Republican state Rep. Rob Brooks told fellow lawmakers in May.

It's open season on "explaining" the U.K. election -- and figuring out what happens next

In the new cabinet Prime Minister Cameron announces in the morning, MP Priti Patel (right) is expected to be one of a group of women considerably expanding the current ranks, which include Education Secretary Nicky Morgan (left) and Home Secretary Theresa May (center). The Telegraph reports that the reshuffled cabinet will be a full third female, with higher-profile roles for some election "stars."


"Want to win from the left? Be left-wing. Offer a real alternative to neo-liberalism."

-- Ian Welsh, on the rout of the U.K.'s Labour Party,
in his Thursday night post on Thursday's election

by Ken

It's easy to ridicule the British election-prognisticating industry for having gotten everything wrong with regard to Thursday's election, and I don't see any reason to hold back on the ridicule. None of them seem to have imagined anything but the tiniest, most minimallly conclusive edge to either the Conservatives or Labour, with much confusion and gridlock ahead.

Still, in retrospect, one thing that may be easier to see now than it was before Thursday is that the U.K. is entering waters that are just about uncharted. Therefore botrh the pundits and the pols are left scrambling to explain what happened and to predict where it's all going to lead, in a situation for which the U.K. doesn't seem to have much applicable historical precedent.


AND THE WINNER IS . . . A CORRUPT SCHMUCK AND STOOGE

I've seen commentarial blurbs attributing a sudden outburst of charisma to Conservative Party leader and now returned Prime Minister David Cameron, and without denigrating his electoral achievement -- or at least not denigrating it too much -- I have to say, huh? Are we talking about the same person?

On Wednesday the guy was a totally corrupt schmuck and stooge, and I don't see that he's anything different now. In point of fact, the photo shows him at 10 Downing Street on Friday. Oh yeah, that's totally the same buttwipe.

What Cameron did, as far as I can tell, was to hold onto his voters, at least in terms of winning seats in Parliament, at least in part by scaring the dickens out of them, raising the specter of radical Scottish MPs in coalition with Labour. This is more than was managed by the leaders of Labour (the party that, after going on a century as one of the U.K.'s two major parties, all but disappeared Thursday), the Liberal Democrats (who, running somewhere to the left of the Tories and the right of Labour, for a while seemed poised to break into the Big Two, or at least have real third-party heft but all but disappeared Thursday), and UKIP, the UK Independence Party (whose vociferous anti-European stance seemed to be making them comers in recent non-parliamentary elections, until they all but disappeared Thursday). Again, this is in terms of winning parliamentary seats; it's not to say that those parties didn't get votes. But if you don't win seats, the votes don't count for much.


ANYBODY HEARD LATELY FROM EX-"DEPUTY PM" NICK CLEGG?

Deputy Nick's rout actually pretty comical. To begin with, when was the last time the schmo did or said anything deputy-prime-ministerial? I suppose he had some sort of voice at the Tory policy-making table, since in the Conservative-LDP coalition government, LDP votes were always needed. But Deputy Nick's status seems to have been reduced to something more Deputy Barney Fife-ish.

And it's not as if he wasn't warned. When Nick pushed the LDP into the coalition with the Conservatives, on the theory that it would give the party a share of power, and a base for goodness only knew what future bounty, there were plenty of people, both inside the party and out, who warned that he was giving the Conservatives what they wanted, power, in exchange for well, nothing -- that he was risking the very future existence of the LDP. In hindsight most everyone sees it now, but there were plenty of people who foresaw it when it was foresight.

It seems clear that in this election LDP candidates weren't offering anything that voters were buying, even -- or especially -- in constituencies they've held easily before.


BUT THEN, THIS IS TRUE OF LABOUR TOO, NO?

In a post written as the exit polls Thursday were forecasting "a likely bare majority government" for the Tories, Ian Welsh described himself as "torn between two reactions" -- on the one hand, a hearty you-asked-for-it to voters who voted Conservative even after five years of knowing what that means (he quoted Mencken: "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it, good and hard"); and on the other hand contempt for the "Tory Lite" Labour campaign of Ed Miliband, running as "the lesser evil," as "not quite as bad as the other bloke, but they’ll get in eventually and do what they were going to do anyway.” ("And that was his platform.")

I’m seeing a lot of despair from my British friends on the left. And my British friends on the sane, for that matter. Here’s what to do: Either take over the Labour Party, or, if you think that’s impossible, pile into the Greens. Or, heck, create a new party.

I will point to Alberta, where the left-most party in Canada won on a platform of, among other things, raising taxes.They came, essentially, from nowhere.   [And you owe it to yourself, if you haven't already read it, to read that May 6 post about the out-of-nowhere victory of "the most left-wing party in Canada" in "the most right-wing province in Canada" in the provincial election. "It would be," Ian wrote, "like an Elizabeth Warren-inspired party winning Texas."]

Want to win from the left? Be left-wing. Offer a real alternative to neo-liberalism.

Ian makes an awfully important point about the revolution wrought by the indomitable Margaret Thatcher. "The true magnitude of Thatcher’s victory," he writes, "was not her policies, it was that Labour became Tory Lite; she changed the acceptable policy matrix for not just the Conservatives, but for the main opposition party as well" (emphasis added).

Until that “acceptable policy window” changes, the trend will continue right -- it cannot do anything else. Each Labour interregnum will be just that, a period in which neo-liberal policies are pursued at a slower rate than during Conservative governments, but in which the trend is not reversed.

This is true in almost every country in the West of which I can think (Iceland and perhaps Finland being the lone exceptions).

Offer a real alternative, with real left wing policies. If you can’t capture an existing major party, pile into a minor party or create a new one. 

WILL CAMERON YET GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS THE
MAN WHO BUSTED THE UNITED KINGDOM APART?

None of which takes in the triumph of the Scottish National Party (SNP), which won 56 of the 59 Scottish seats in the Parliament in London. SNP candidates hoped the election results would have them negotiating with Labour to form a new government. Instead, Scotland will be at the mercy of a central government likely to be pursuing even more austerity and, as Ian Welsh puts it, the sweeping away of "most of the remains of the post-war welfare state."

Ian notes that "Scots may really be regretting not voting for independence" in the great separation referendum. "Most of the wonderful social policies Scots value more than the English," he says, "will now be taken away from them." The lesson? "Failure of courage when there is a real alternative will reap the expected results."

Now we remember the promises Prime Minister Cameron made to the Scots in the increasingly panicky weeks before the referendum when it looked as if they were really prepared to vote for independence, and he stood to go down in history as the man who presided over the busting up of the United Kingdom. Well, he got through that vote, and I don't imagine that any of those promises have been heard from again. You have to wonder about anyone who thought they would be.

One concession Cameron won was a pledge that the independence referendum wouldn't become a regular, recurring thing, that it would be a "once in a generation" deal. It remains to be seen, though, whether Scots will feel bound by a promise made to a man who did nothing but lie to them. Already the PM is insisting that there will no second Scottish independence referendum, even though, according to The Scotsman, "Downing Street sources at the weekend said Cameron is 'very concerned' about the election result, which has left just three pro-Union MPs out of 59 from Scotland." He insists, though, that the government will continue with all reforms and pledges already promised. He says he's "very confident" that he won't be the last prime minister of the United Kingdom.


THE "LET'S GET OUT OF EUROPE" ISSUE ISN'T DEAD

As far as I know, the electoral failure of UKIP was as unforeseen as those of Labour and the LDP. And given the general ugliness of the party's appeal, there's some comfort in this surprise, at least.

The nativist response to economic woes isn't likely to disappear that quickly, especially since Cameron, sensing that it could only be a losing issue for him, tried to skirt it. He's pretty much committed, though, to a vote by the end of 2017 on pulling the U.K. out of the European Union. But, report the Washington Post's XXXXX and Dan Balz, "some are pushing for the vote to come far sooner so that uncertainty doesn't hang over Britain's economic and political fortunes for the next 2½ years."

Polls suggest that if the vote were held today, Britain would choose to stay in the E.U. But the energized voices for “out” are gearing up for the fight, in the belief that the country could better manage itself without meddling from Brussels.

Opponents of an exit say it could be catastrophic, leading to an exodus of jobs and a muffling of Britain’s voice both in Europe and beyond.

Cameron has projected ambivalence on the issue, saying he wants the country to remain inside Europe, but only if he can win critical changes to the E.U. charter — changes his European allies have repeatedly said they are unwilling to grant.

The question will divide not only the country but also Cameron’s government, with some of his top lieutenants likely to push for an exit.

And it's not as if Cameron can expect clear sailing on, well, anything. At first blush, all those reports about the election which include the qualification about his "bare majority" seem kind of niggling. After all, he went from not having any kind of majority, having to rely on his coalition with the LDP, to having an actual majority of his party's own! But commentators point out that the bareness of that majority makes the prime minister significantly more dependent on every crackpot back-bencher than he has been in his first term, when he could usually expect enough LDP votes to cover any dissension in his ranks.

And as the U.K. political system veers ever closer to ours, the likelihood only grows that party leaders won't be able to count on party discipline to stifle such dissension.


ON ONE ISSUE, AT LEAST, WE CAN CREDIT
PM CAMERON WITH GENUINE COURAGE

In the immediate wake of the election results, the Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart pointed out, in a "Post Partisan" blogpost, "David Cameron victory also a win for gay marriage," one marked contrast between "their" conservatives and ours.

Civil partnerships, the United Kingdom’s answer to civil unions, started in 2005. That’s the year Cameron became leader of the Conservative party. In 2010, he became prime minister. The following year, Cameron’s coalition started looking at ways to legalize same-sex marriage in the U.K. Using his conservative credentials to make the case, Cameron succeeded. In 2013, same-sex couples began to wed.

Cameron showed true leadership. Neither his nation nor his party supported Cameron on marriage equality. So, angry were Conservative leaders that they predicted the death of the Tories. The BBC reported in 2013 that Cameron’s move on marriage “is thought to have been one of the factors behind a mass defection of grassroots members to the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in some parts of the country.” It added that a leading Conservative think tank “warned that the party is ‘dying’ and facing ‘an existential crisis’.” And, in a 2013 letter to Cameron, a Conservative leader wrote, “I am personally convinced that the Conservative Party has little chance of winning a majority at the general election unless you reach a sensible accommodation on this subject and draw people back who have gone to UKIP or have no intention of voting at all.”

"Man, were they wrong," Jonathan writes, and adds:

This ought to be a lesson for Republican politicians who always lambast liberal U.S. leadership in favor of our conservative cousins in the U.K. Just look at the GOP presidential candidates. They all oppose marriage equality. But when asked whether they would attend a same-sex wedding of a loved one or a friend, their responses ranged from humane to heartless. These folks need to move into the 21st century with the rest of the country — and Cameron.

"The Cameron victory," Jonathan writes, "is further proof of three things: marriage equality is not antithetical to conservatism, support for same-sex marriage is not a killer at the ballot box, and the electorate ultimately won’t care when they see that the sky hasn’t fallen because the nice gay couple next door can legally marry."

He concludes: "I can’t wait for the GOP to wake up to that reality."

#

Does It Matter To You Who Wins The British Election Next Week?

During the American Revolution, Patriots didn't just have the British Army and Hessian mercenaries to contend with. At least 20% of the white colonists, conservatives, were traitors and sided with the British. As many as 2.5 million colonials were Tories or Royalists and after the war almost 100,000 of them fled the 13 colonies for Britain, Canada and other British colonies. Benjamin Franklin's own son, William, was one of them-- a governor of New Jersey who stayed loyal to the crown and settled in London after the British and their conservative allies were defeated.

A week from tomorrow-- Thursday May 7-- the Brits will elect a new government and 632 Members of Parliament. There are 302 Conservatives, 56 Liberal Democrats (so 358 in the coalition) and 256 members of the Labour Party in the out-going Parliament. Right-wing American businessman Bob Dudley, CEO of British Petroleum has endorsed the Conservative Party, as have tabloids the Daily Mail and the Daily Express. Eddie Izzard and Stephen Hawking have endorsed Labour.

Polling shows a virtual dead heat and most seat predictions show the Conservatives winning a narrow victory over Labour, although Labour + the Scottish National Party will command a majority. But what about the rest of the world? Yesterday, The Guardian tried figuring out who Obama, Putin, Modi, Hassan Rouhani and Robert Mugabe would be voting for.

US-- Miliband

Obama himself has established a workably cordial relationship with David Cameron, though the UK has looked increasingly marginal to the White House of late: noticeably absent from recent negotiations with Russia over Ukraine and incurring the wrath of Obama by siding with China over new banking institutions.

A re-election for Cameron also raises the prospect of a referendum on Britain leaving the EU, one of the few issues of domestic UK politics on which Obama has ever expressed an opinion.

Though the current president may have less concern for Britain than his interventionist predecessor or likely successors, he would still rather see a British-flavoured EU than an EU where the French and Germans called all the shots alone.

Meanwhile, many of the Republican frontrunners have already began working on their Atlanticist credentials by making trips to London, and would no doubt much prefer if Cameron were to stay on the other end of the special relationship.

Indeed, one of the first indications that Jeb Bush was poised to join the 2016 race was when he turned up with the chancellor, George Osborne, on a tour of Britain’s conservative power brokers last November. Governors Scott Walker and Chris Christie were not far behind with trips that also suggest the GOP mainstream would feel most comfortable with another Tory-led government in London.

But not all Republicans naturally lean towards the Tories. The libertarian-minded maverick Rand Paul may find more common cause with Ed Miliband on issues of foreign policy, where the Labour leader’s role in blocking western air strikes in Syria chimes with a growing strand of anti-interventionism on the US right.

Conversely, it is far from a given that the more hawkish Hillary Clinton would slot in with Labour anywhere near as comfortably as her husband once did.

Russia-- Cameron

“Who does Vladimir Putin want to see running Britain after May 7?” This was the question posed by Nick Boles, a Tory minister, on Twitter recently. Boles was pretty sure he knew the answer: Ed Miliband and the Scottish nationalists. “The man who abandoned the Syrians to their fate and the woman who wants to scrap our nuclear deterrent,” he wrote.

However, according to Sergei Utkin, an analyst working on Russian relations with EU countries, while the British general election is hardly top of the agenda for most Russian politicians, if anything the preference is probably for a Conservative victory. “In general the Conservatives are a known evil, so even if our relations are not so good there will be an expectation that they won’t get any worse,” he said.

Some in the Russian elite with property in London or family studying in the UK might prefer a Labour victory because they felt the left would be more tolerant on immigration, Utkin claimed, but the political elite would be more likely to err on the side of hoping for the status quo.

There is also considerable interest in the rise of the smaller parties, and the disproportionate influence they could wield in a hung parliament with just a few MPs.

Nigel Farage famously said he admired Putin’s political style, and there are reasons to believe the affection could be mutual. While Ukip has not received the kind of Russian money that other European far-right groups such as France’s Front National have had, Farage is a regular guest on the Kremlin’s Russia Today television network, where his message of a broken Europe goes down well.

On the one hand, Farage’s line that Britain, as a sovereign country, should be able to make its own policy decisions and not be subordinate to Brussels resonates with many Russian politicians on a philosophical level. More pragmatically, they also feel that a referendum on the UK’s EU membership would keep Britain and the EU busy for some time.

“Britain leaving the EU would make both Britain and the EU much weaker, which those in the Russian leadership feel would be good for Russia. And if Brussels and London are occupied with the debate over the issue for years, then it will leave less time for working on a tough common foreign policy,” said Utkin.

Germany-- Miliband

At the start of his tenure, David Cameron was viewed as something of a breath of fresh air in Berlin-- smart, charismatic, youthful-- and a good partner for Angela Merkel to work with.

But Europe is always the first hurdle at which relations between British and German conservatives fall. CDU politicians are, without fail, staunch Europeans. The unbridgeable gulf between them and their Eurosceptic counterparts in the UK has often made relations between two otherwise natural political bedfellows quite a challenge.

Cameron’s performance on the international stage has made German policymakers lose their patience. There was his clumsy resistance over not wanting Jean-Claude Juncker to become president of the European commission, and the tactless enthusiasm with which he withdrew Tory MEPs from the European People’s party.

How telling it is, says Gerhard Dannemann, a German expert on Britain, that: “In the event of a European crisis it was once Cameron that Obama used to call. Nowadays it’s Merkel.”

For Germans who have been following the UK election campaign closely, observing everything from Cameron’s consumption of a hotdog with a knife and fork (“awkward,” said one commentator) to the PM-less TV debate (“cowardly” said another), the only issue that truly matters is Europe.

The nervousness that stems from knowing that a Conservative win equals a referendum on Europe by the end of 2017, and all that a subsequent Brexit might entail, is palpable in Berlin.

Berlin will lose an important EU partner should the UK vote to leave-- not just as a trading partner, but in like-minded thinking on everything from immigrant access to benefits, to ensuring that the EU stays competitive. And without the UK, the domination of the southern states, including France, would be almost overwhelming for Germany.

From that point of view Ed Miliband, even though he comes from a completely different political camp, may make a far easier partner for Merkel to work with than Cameron.

China-- undecided

Lively debates about Britain often pop up in China: from discussions of Benedict Cumberbatch and Premier League matches, to the state of Charles and Camilla’s marriage and the wares at Bicester Village outlet shopping centre.

When it comes to next month’s election, however, there is a resounding silence. There is far greater interest in a poll more than 18 months away-- the US presidential ballot-- than the one in a matter of weeks. One of the few bothering to comment-- the HereinUK account on Sina’s Weibo microblog-- has focused on the process: “The must-have skill for every leader in the election-- taking selfies,” it said, beneath pictures of Cameron, Nick Clegg, Miliband and Farage posing with voters.

The political elite are similarly indifferent to the campaign. For the world’s second-largest economy, the UK is just one among many partners. And while the current British government has been accused of cosying up to Beijing, adopting a trade-first policy largely at the chancellor’s behest after it was frozen out over Cameron’s meeting with the Dalai Lama, there is no sign that Miliband would take a substantially different tack.

“China highly values its bilateral relations with Britain, but I don’t think it worries much about the election outcome-- it won’t drastically affect Britain’s current China policies,” said Wang Yiwei, director of the China-Europe Academic Network and a professor at Renmin University.

“Their attitudes towards China are quite similar: a closer relationship with China means a new and great opportunity for not just London, the financial centre, but the British economy as a whole.

“Though not having a decisive result and forming a coalition might give rise to concerns about investment efficiency, it’s quite clear that Britain welcomes investment from China. I don’t think the authorities would worry too much.”

Zhao Chen, deputy chief of the European politics department at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, agreed: “Whichever party wins the election won’t affect Sino-UK relations and the UK’s China policies much … Labour also highly values the Chinese market.”

If the decision of British voters does end up disrupting relations, it will probably be a long-term and unintentional consequence of other Labour-Tory policy differences. An exit from the EU would reduce the UK’s importance to China.

“Though London is the global financial centre, it is the integrated EU market that makes the UK attractive to Chinese investments. China sees the UK as the bridgehead for the EU and is interested in the 500-million-population EU market rather than just [the] domestic market,” Zhao said.

South Africa-- Miliband; Zimbabwe-- Cameron

Few in South Africa would mourn a defeat for David Cameron. Last year, President Jacob Zuma was scheduled to visit the UK twice but cancelled both times. First he ducked out of Britain’s official memorial service for Nelson Mandela and attended the wedding of Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe’s daughter instead.Then he skipped a summit because, sources say, he was warned that he would “doorstepped” by the media and relations with the UK were frosty.

The leaders’ relationship may never have recovered from Cameron’s first visit to South Africa as prime minister in 2011, when they were poles apart over the ousting of Muammar Gaddafi. Many senior figures in South Africa believe that Libya’s subsequent descent into chaos has vindicated their criticism of western military intervention.

Then, in 2013, South Africa rebuked the British government for stopping direct aid to the country after two decades, describing it as “tantamount to redefining our relationship”. Conversely, Labour appeals to the trade union allies of the ruling ANC and is believed to have offered advice to the party during its 1999 election campaign. Aubrey Matshiqi, a political commentator, says: “Traditionally there have been strong relations between the ANC and Labour, and the ANC has preferred Labour to win.”

This time, however, with South Africa focused on trade partners such as Brazil, China, India and Russia, the British election has received little attention. “There are three South Africans who know who Ed Miliband is,” Matshiqi adds. “I could be exaggerating. It might only be two.”

In neighbouring Zimbabwe it appears that political alliances are reversed. Mugabe has never forgiven Labour for reneging on promises of funding land redistribution made under the 1979 Lancaster House agreement. Only this month he thundered again: “Blair, Blair, who was he? Just the prime minister of Britain. I’m president of Zimbabwe.” After Labour’s defeat in 2010, the ageing president reportedly said: “It looks like I can do business with Britain again.”

British-born Piers Pigou, southern Africa project director of the International Crisis Group, says: “They still live with the antipathy towards Blair and Labour. They don’t seem to get that the party today isn’t that close to the Blair and Labour of the 90s. They have a penchant for the Conservative party and prefer them to win, which is kind of ironic considering that the bulk of opposition to re-engagement is likely to come from the Conservatives.”

Mugabe remains under EU sanctions and has no personal relationship with Cameron, but there is said to have been discreet communication between the two governments. Last year Zimbabwe hosted its first British trade delegation in about two decades, hailed by the finance minister, Patrick Chinamasa, as “the first step in our normalisation of relations between the United Kingdom and Zimbabwe”. But as for 7 May, says the Harare-based political analyst Ibbo Mandaza, “I don’t think they’ve thought about it. I’ve seen no analysis, no reference to the British election at all.”

France-- Miliband

Unlike good wine, British politics does not travel well in France and vice versa. For years, journalists in Paris would write about the “centre-right government of Gaullist Jacques Chirac,” when it was considerably to the left of Tony Blair’s Labour administration.

As François Hollande’s current Socialist government has moved closer to his country’s traditional partner, Germany, Britain seems to have dropped off France’s radar.

Bruno Bernard, a political speechwriter, and parliamentary adviser to a former UMP minister, said: “If you ask, most French still think Tony Blair is prime minister. Since his election David Cameron has made no impression on France. He’s already been in power for five years and I don’t believe people in France even know the UK is having an election.

“Farage and Ukip are making an impression, but because of Marine Le Pen, who is all anyone is talking about in France at the moment.”

Pascal Canfin, a member of the Europe-Ecology-Green party and a former minister for development in Hollande’s Socialist administration, is concerned about how the UK election will play out for climate and environmental issues.

“In the event the only way the Conservatives have a majority is with Ukip, this will leave the government hostage to climate sceptics. However, I have spoken to Miliband’s advisers and special envoys and their position is much more positive for France.

“Europe is another dimension to the British election, and we have to admit that if there’s a Conservative government that is obliged to make an alliance with Ukip, we’ll have a British position on Europe that has moved very far away from the French position.

“Britain will surely seek to negotiate treaties and repatriate powers to its sovereign government. If there’s a Labour government in alliance with the SNP, there will be a closer ally, able to construct a better relationship with France. Clearly, there are two different paths.”

The former justice minister and MEP Rachida Dati, who served in Nicolas Sarkozy’s government, says Brussels is watching the UK election “with a lot of interest."

“The United Kingdom’s place in Europe, and thus the future of Europe, are at the heart of this campaign. David Cameron has had the courage to propose holding a referendum in 2017, because this meets a deep wish of the British people.

“Certain people in Brussels fear the result, for fear of being shaken out of their comfort zone. I believe Brussels and the member state governments would be obliged to hear the message from Britain. I am personally convinced the change in Europe sought by David Cameron is wished for by many Europeans: a Europe that is less bureacratic.”

India-- Miliband

The British elections have attracted little attention so far in India, despite historic links and the repeated visits of ministers over recent years.

“There was a peak of interest when Cameron came in, but even that wasn’t much compared to the interest [Tony] Blair and [Gordon] Brown generated,” says Dipankar De Sarkar, a Delhi-based columnist and former correspondent in the UK.

Many Indians have been put off by the “anti-immigration rhetoric” in the UK in recent years, and the Conservative government’s tightening of visa policies, he says.

“The whole sentiment has just turned people off the UK here. The rise of Ukip hasn’t helped. Indians for a long time looked at the UK as a gateway to Europe too, but that has also slipped.”

If any Indians are tempted to pick sides, there is a historic tendency to favour the Labour party, seen as supportive of India’s independence from Britain in 1947. However, Cameron has visited India repeatedly and Ed Miliband is “an unknown quantity”, according to Kanwal Sibal, a former senior diplomat.

Miliband’s recent promise to remove tax privileges from wealthy foreigners living in Britain, a favoured base of many Indian tycoons, has “ruffled a few feathers," Sibal says, which may lead to “a slight preference for Cameron” among the Indian elite.

The local Hindustan Times noted that the Labour party had not mentioned India in its manifesto, whereas the Conservatives, “viewed by many Asians as the ‘nasty party’,” had “made significant mention of India."

The newspaper noted that the Ukip manifesto had mentioned India too, in the context of its desire “to foster closer ties with the Anglosphere."

Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, has significant support among the Indian community in the UK.

Jaimini Bhagwati, who was India’s high commissioner in London from 2012 to 2013, says that India, though a developing country, has found it easier to “do business” with rightwing governments in the UK and the US, and that many within the emerging power are uneasy with Miliband, who reminds them of an “old-style trade union leader."

“Normally you’d think that a Labour government would be favourable to us but it’s the Conservatives who have their ear closer to the ground in terms of getting things done. At the end of the day, at our stage of development, it’s about technology and capital,” Bhagwati says.

Modi’s first meeting with Cameron took place on the margins of the G20 in Brisbane, Australia, last year. The British prime minister praised his counterpart’s “vision” and stressed India was a top priority of the UK’s foreign policy. After Modi’s election in May last year Cameron spoke of how “Britain and India now both [had] bold reforming governments that believe in free enterprise and progress."

The UK has expanded its presence in India-- the diplomatic mission is one of the biggest in the world-- and has made expanding trade a key objective. On a recent visit, Philip Hammond, the foreign secretary, spoke too of “shared security interests” globally and in the region.

The reality, however, is that British efforts to “move the relationship to another level” seem to have left the Indians largely unmoved. Modi has focused his foreign policy efforts primarily on relations in the region, then on the US, with Europe and the UK a long way down the list. He is expected to travel to London after the election, however.

Australia-- Cameron

Australia’s prime minister, Tony Abbott, is probably the country’s most famous anglophile.

And though he has made no public comment on the British election, there is also little doubt the Australian Liberal prime minister would welcome the return of David Cameron to Downing Street on 7 May.

During a visit by Cameron to Australia in November 2014, Abbott described the relationship between the UK and its former penal colony as “a relationship between, if not quite equals, certainly peers, and as important as any relationship on this earth."

Abbott and Cameron have a cordial personal relationship, though they differ significantly on certain policy issues, most notably on climate change. Cameron was quick to congratulate Abbott on his election victory in September 2013, taking to social media to declare: “It will be great working with another centre-right leader.”

Cameron visited the Australian parliament last year while in the country for the G20 meeting, and the two leaders have worked together on issues such as counter-terrorism.

The connections run deeper. Cameron has Lynton Crosby, an Australian, as his campaign director. Crosby ran campaigns for the Liberal party in Australia in 1998 and in 2001. Mark Textor, Crosby’s business partner, is the Liberal party’s current pollster. Textor is also on board as strategic adviser to Cameron and the Tories for the current campaign.

Iran-- undecided

Iran may have more serious issues to worry about than the forthcoming UK election, but who governs next in Westminster is still important for Tehran leaders. The UK is among the six major powers currently negotiating with Iran to find a permanent settlement to the decades-long dispute over its nuclear programme.

Under the Tories, Iran-UK relations experienced peaks and troughs. In November 2011, the British embassy in Tehran was stormed by a mob who ransacked offices and diplomatic residences. It triggered one of the worst crises in bilateral relations since the 1979 Islamic revolution as Britain withdrew all its staff from Tehran and expelled all Iranian diplomats from London in retaliation for the attack. All but nominal relations were severed.

But since the moderate president, Hassan Rouhani, took office in 2013, Tehran-London relations have improved. Both countries have upgraded ties to the level of non-resident charges d’affaires and taken significant steps towards reopening their missions.

Later in 2013, Cameron and Rouhani spoke on the phone, in the first direct contact between a British prime minister and Iranian president in a decade.

In 2014, a parliamentary delegation from the UK, led by the former foreign secretary Jack Straw, travelled to Tehran to improve ties. Britain’s chargé d’affaires, Ajay Sharma, has also travelled to Iran a number of times trying to mend relations. A group of Iranian parliamentarians have since visited Westminister, in the first visit to the UK by Iranian MPs in nearly 50 years.

In September 2014, Cameron and Rouhani met in New York on the sidelines of the UN general assembly. It was the first encounter between an Iranian president and a British prime minister since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Despite these improvements, Britain and Iran have not yet technically opened their embassies in their respective capitals. That may change with a new prime minister in Downing Street.

David Cameron's Conservative Party Is Drip, Drip, Dripping Away

Historically, mainstream conservative parties always devolve into fascism

John Boehner is always crying how hard it is for him to control the teabaggers and libertarians inside his own caucus. David Cameron knows just what he means-- in spades. As we mentioned in the last few weeks, two prominent Members of Parliament, Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless, quit his party, blamed him and joined the racist and fascist-oriented UKIP, which seeks to replace the Conservatives as the British party of the right.

Here we are, right in the middle of the big Conservative Party conference that kicks off their election campaign, and Cameron just lost another big-name Conservative to the fascists. Former London Deputy Mayor Richard Barnes slammed Cameron and his party on the way out. He said he was leaving because Cameron was basically full of shit when it comes to EU renegotiations. He added that be is going with the fascists because the 3 respectable parties don't "speak the language of normal people."

Amid fears among Tory whips that the Ukip leader, Nigel Farage, is planning to disrupt David Cameron’s speech on Wednesday with further defections, [London Mayor Boris] Johnson moved to lower the temperature. In a speech to a rally organised by the ConservativeHome website, the London mayor mocked the “quitters, splitters and kippers” who have defected to Ukip as he extended a 20-year-old invitation to Farage to join the Tories.

Barnes, a member of the London assembly between 2000 and 2012, ignored his former boss as he announced his decision in an interview with the London Evening Standard. He said: “There seems to be a detachment from ordinary people’s lives in the Westminster village. The parties just don’t seem to relate and talk the language of normal people.”

The former deputy mayor, who wants Britain to leave the EU, dismissed the prime minister’s renegotiation plans. He told the Standard: “Do we really believe they can create a new settlement by 2017, with the agreement of all the member states? It’s just unrealistic. There has to be more clarity and it’s not there at the moment.

“Our borders are massively porous. Immigration is a good idea, but it has to bring a benefit to our economic, social and cultural life. It cannot be to take advantage of the NHS or to exploit the benefits system. At the moment it’s a mess. We don’t count people in, or count them out. That would be a good place to start.”

Barnes, who is gay, says he is unworried by claims that Ukip is a homophobic party after a former Tory councillor and Ukip member blamed the floods this year on the legalisation of same-sex marriage.

Barnes said: “I’ll stand my ground against any prat. They are in all the parties. I don’t think they become homophobic the moment they join Ukip.”

The former deputy mayor faced embarrassment last year when intimate photographs of him appeared on his Facebook account. Barnes said the account had been hacked. The pictures, believed to have been taken on his iPhone, appeared when changes to iOS settings eased the uploading of photos from Apples devices to Facebook.

In his speech at the ConservativeHome rally on Monday, Johnson joked that Ukip members were the sort of people who could damage themselves with a vacuum cleaner. “I have read that there are some people, probably the type who think of defecting to Ukip, who present themselves at A&E with barely credible injuries sustained in the course of vacuum cleaner abuse,” he said.

Johnson mentioned vacuum cleaners amid reports that the European commission intends to impose restrictions on the devices. “I am perfectly willing to concede that if you do not handle your vacuum cleaner correctly you may end up accidentally inhaling the hamster, the budgerigar through the bars of the cage.”

Ye typical Conservative Member of Parliament

Double Trouble For Cameron As One Conservative Defects To The Fascists And Another Resigns In A Sex Scandal

Just under a month ago, we reported how Conservative Member of Parliament Douglas Carswell had ditched the Tories and joined the fascist-oriented UKIP. The libertarian-leaning Carswell resigned from Parliament, triggering a by-election, in which he is favored to win-- and become the UKIP's only Member of Parliament. Earlier today he was joined by another Tory Member, Mark Reckless, a drunkard and former UBS Warburg stock crook, the Member for Rochester and Strood, southeast of London in north Kent. Like Carswell, he dumped the Conservative Party, joined UKIP and triggered a by-election by resigning his seat. He did it rather dramatically, as both parties of the right-- the Conservatives in Birmingham and UKIP in Doncaster-- were starting their annual conventions.

It was a bad day for Cameron, who also lost a Cabinet minister in another Conservative Party sex scandal-- this one based on a fake Twitter account set up specifically to ensnare randy Conservative legislators. Civil Society Minister Brooks Newmark was the one the Sunday Mirror caught. Newmark, who is very wealthy, 56 years old, married and has 5 children, was forced to resign after he sent an Anthony Weiner-like photo of himself to a male newspaper reporter posing as a horny conservative girl. He attempted to set up an offline liaison with "her," although when first confronted, he denied everything before looking at the clear evidence and realizing his political career was over.

Reckless' defection was an even worse blow for David Cameron, coming at the start of a conference that was the kickoff to the Conservative reelection campaign.

Reckless, who told cheering UKIP delegates yesterday that “the leadership of the Conservative Party is part of the problem that is holding our country back,” said he’s resigning his seat in the House of Commons. He then plans to run as a UKIP candidate in a special election in his district. He’s following in the footsteps of Douglas Carswell, the first Tory to defect a month ago, who’s running for re-election for UKIP in his Clacton constituency to the east of London on Oct. 9.

Cameron condemned Reckless’s move today, telling BBC Television’s “Andrew Marr Show” that “to act in a way that makes a Conservative government less likely is senseless and counterproductive.” Carswell and Reckless are two people who “want to leave the European Union no matter what,” he said in Birmingham, central England, the venue for the Tory conference. He called the news from the UKIP conference “frustrating.”

…Reckless told UKIP delegates in Doncaster, northern England, that he believes the premier is only using the pledge of a referendum “as a device.” He said voters had been “ripped off and lied to.”

A ComRes Ltd. poll for the Sunday Mirror and Independent on Sunday newspapers put UKIP support at 19 percent, in third place behind the Tories’ 29 percent and Labour’s 35 percent. Forty-three percent of UKIP backers voted Tory in 2010. ComRes interviewed 2,003 adults Sept. 24-26. It didn’t specify a margin of error.

…Reckless’s move presents Farage with the prospect of UKIP gaining its first two elected members of Parliament within a few weeks. Carswell is the clear favorite with bookmakers to be re-elected in Clacton.

The latest defector took 49.2 percent of the vote in his district in Kent in the 2010 general election, more than 20 percentage points ahead of the second-placed Labour Party candidate.

Still, “the seat is much less natural UKIP territory than Clacton, Rob Ford, co-author of :Revolt on the Right," a study of the party, said in an interview. "All hell will break loose if the Tories lose there. They gave up in Clacton, but they have to crush Reckless here."

Reckless told reporters he thinks he has "a fighting chance" of re-election, though Rochester is "not even in the top 100 of Conservative seats vulnerable to UKIP" in the 650-member House of Commons.

Should be a fun election campaign!