The Sketch: Cameron drubbed by brawn of bipolar Brown

"A comprehensive drubbing" the PM called it yesterday. The Chancellor had given the Tories one in the pension debate the day before. Cameron had been goading Blair about the Chancellor's defects and Blair goaded back with a celebration - generous, in the circumstances - of the Chancellor's victory in the debate.

Indeed, there is enough truth in the PM's claim to discomfort Tories. The Chancellor was at one of the further ends of his bipolarity, belting out figures, dates, billions and bullion, and fiscal ordure of every sort in what we might call a cacaleptic fit. Never has he seemed more vulnerable, frothing and thrashing, and reading out compulsively from imaginary tables. And yet he scored a technical win. The PM could call it "a comprehensive drubbing".

The entire world believes Gordon Brown to be the architect of our pension disaster and the Tories failed to nail him up for it. That's quite a failure and it goes deep into the roots of Conservative thinking. They indignantly charged the Chancellor with destroying pensions by abolishing the tax incentive for pensions. But they had no answer to the counter-charge that their own chancellors had been doing the same for years.

Why hadn't they? Did they think it wouldn't be brought up? Did they think they could get away by ignoring the question? Cameron is exercising himself in a new sort of Tory discourse ("competitive caring" to paraphrase the PM). If "saying sorry" is one of the new virtues, why couldn't Cameron "say sorry" for his own party's cutting of the pension incentive? He could even retrieve the Tory position by pointing out that Ken Clark went the other way ("learning lessons" as the current cant has it)

Maybe Cameron has calculated that the cost of being dragged back into the past is too high. But there's no better way of repudiating the past than by apologising for it. It even sounds honest. Partly because it is. What a Clause Four that would be. "We are no longer going to blame the Government for our own most obvious fault!" But you can't abolish the first law of politics just like that.

The PM was reflecting at his press conference on the difficulty faced equally by politicians and media of presenting complex political realities to the public. He hasn't enough time to reinvent his own. So he will continue to refer to the poll tax, and Cameron's unsatisfactory contribution to the British economy : "A bit part in Black Wednesday" (cries of "More!").

PS: Tony Blair called it "a difficult decision that was fully justified": charging speeding motorists a fee to pay for support for battered wives. The Government has gently completed its lift-off and is preparing for a journey to a very different world.

simoncarr@sketch.sc

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