Gerald Warner: God help the Conservative Party if it carries on like this

DAVE does God. The Prime Minister’s Christmas message was described as having “the most overtly Christian tone of any prime minister in recent memory” – which speaks volumes about the spiritual ethos of contemporary British governance.

Apparently the intrusion of 77 words of quasi-religious waffle into the vast canon of Daveguff signals a historic conversion.

Dave cited the Gospel of St John; for understandable reasons he avoided St Paul and Leviticus, whose texts give scant comfort to the leading apostle of same-sex marriage. What was most impressive was the subtlety of this exercise. Clearly there are razor-sharp minds advising Dave (“Sorry to disturb you, George, but Lynton wants me to throw a few buns to the Christians: could you just remind me how many persons there are in the Trinity – M’tutor was a bit vague about that…”). The turkey entrails augur that 2013 will be an annus horribilis for this comic singer and his pseudo-Conservative Party.

Sometimes there is an almost holy innocence about the mind-boggling naïvety of Dave and his bunkerful of modernisers. The notion that the most anti-Christian government in British history, whose lawyers were recently contesting at Strasbourg the right of believers to wear the cross in the workplace, which is destroying the sacrament of marriage, could appease angry Christians with such empty platitudes could only be entertained by the terminally deluded. Meanwhile, at Midnight Masses across Britain, Catholic prelates normally distinguished by their bland episcobabble were denouncing the government in terms not heard from such sources since before the Reformation.

Hours later, Dave launched his next damage-limitation exercise, telling rural communities he could not deliver on his pledge to repeal the Hunting Act in England and Wales. His tactic here was “Live, horse, and you’ll get grass” – elect Dave with a thumping majority in 2015 and the Act will be history before you can say “Tally-ho”. Since a snowflake in Hell at noon on Midsummer’s Day has a better prospect of survival than the Conservative Party at the next election, that is a somewhat unconvincing appeal to the despised “Turnip Taleban”. Countrymen have now lost their sole inducement not to defect to UKIP. Since part of the potential anti-hunting majority would be provided by Tory MPs from the 2010 intake, their constituencies will now be targeted by pro-hunting activists who have already claimed an impressive number of scalps in recent elections.

Some dim apprehension of his predicament seems finally to have dawned on Dave, hence the pathetic attempt at appeasement. All the evidence suggests that, just as a cover-up wreaks more damage than the original offence, Dave’s token rehabilitation exercise will compound the unpopularity he has incurred by his policies. The semi-demi-retreat on wind power is an example. While Tory rhetoric grows more sceptical, Ed Davey as UK energy minister pursues his green madness and the landscape is obliterated beneath a forest of wind turbines. The man who preached the virtues of “localism”, reinforced by his fatuous “Big Society”, is now ripping up planning controls south of the Border so that developers can rape any part of the rural landscape not already occupied by a wind farm.

Europe is fatally toxic for “cast-iron” Dave; in 2013 it will become an even worse nightmare for him, regardless of the synthetic Eurosceptic grandstanding in which he will indulge. On immigration, he prates of reducing the influx to “tens of thousands each year”, while the serially incompetent home secretary Theresa May is more than 100,000 above her quota. The reality is that nothing will be done and the whole country knows it. The question is: where do the Tories imagine their votes are going to come from?

One new poll suggests an answer that will no doubt put a spring in Dave’s step. Due to its drive for same-sex marriage, support for the Conservative Party among homosexuals has risen from 11 per cent to 30 per cent. Since Office for National Statistics figures show this constituency amounts to 1.5 per cent of the population and the total number of voters at the 2010 general election was 29.6 million, Dave has increased the Conservative vote among homosexuals by 84,000. This is the Holy Grail for which the Tory modernisers have striven so assiduously. Presumably they will discount as “unhelpful” the surveys showing the same policy has lost their party 1.3 million votes among the rest of the population.

As this suicidal trajectory continues through 2013, it will be unsurprising if the Tories turn to God in earnest: no other resort remains to this busted-flush party. As the prophet foretold: “Cometh the Heir of Blair” (Dave 20: 5).

Twitter: @GeraldWarner1