Cameron - the mule of politics.

The Daily Telegraph reports on next week's Conservative Party conference at Bournemouth.

David Cameron has plundered ideas from the television shows, The Dragons' Den and The X Factor, in an attempt to spice up this year's Conservative conference, it will be announced today.

Under the banner "A New Direction", Mr Cameron will use his first conference as leader to transform the annual seaside gathering.

Ann Widdecombe will be transformed into a Tory "dragon," while activists will take part in X Factor-style votes in some debates.

Not having seen either of the shows mentioned, I cannot gauge the precise depths to which Cameron is taking this once great party but we can be fairly sure that it will plumbs the depths of populism. This blog has already the noted the lack of substance in Cameron's recent major speech on foreign policy. We can also note his devotion to fashionable leftish causes such as global warming and his incredible love young thugs speech. It all adds up to an insubstantial approach to electioneering: a strategy for the next general election based on presenting the Conservatives as more modishly caring than either Labour or the Liberal Democrats.

Cameron's attempts to portray the Conservatives as populist with-it liberals brings to mind Disraeli's words in Coningsby, when he wrote:

It seems to me a barren thing, this Conservatism, an unhappy cross-breed; the mule of politics that engenders nothing.