David Cameron (Debate)

Sun 10 Sep 2017, 12:21 (last edited on Sun 10 Sep 2017, 12:43)

" Why him [Cameron] I too was disappointed."

It's truly depressing that anyone in Charlbury can make such uninformed and spiteful comments about a neighbour as some beginning to crop up here.

I suspect few people in Charlbury have campaigned as intensively, consistently and at such personal expense against the politician David Cameron over the past decade as me. And Cameron didn't open the Community Centre: Freddy did. Trivial point to some - but this is Charlbury: we get our facts straight here..

Credit for getting the Centre designed and opened belongs to hundreds of people of course. But from May 2001 to September 2016, David Cameron was prominent among them. And he's easily the most famous.

The CC team (of which I'm not part) did plan to ask Cameron to perform the ceremony. After hearing the depth of opposition to his politics, they changed the plan. They'd get a political neutral to cut the ribbon, but get Cameron to play some role. That role turned into delivering a stunning speech: by far the best love letter to a town I've heard in a long, politically engaged and sceptical life, and the best I've read apart from Pericles about Athens. His understanding of us was witty, learned, sympathetic, as honest as any love letter can be and an object lesson to all MPs. And infinitely funnier than Pericles.

Marjorie and the rest of the Thomas Gifford team deserve congratulations for a brilliant compromise, and for the result it produced.

In my life, I've had the good fortune to have had among my MPs (for roughly identical periods) two of the past century's champions of closeness to their constituents: Bessie Braddock and David Cameron. Cameron's dedication to West Oxfordshire has been at least as great as Mrs Braddock's to Liverpool Exchange, and his performance yesterday was infinitely better than anything I ever heard from her.

If he'd been at a meeting about Brexit or social justice, I'd have been upfront heckling louder (and more rudely) than anyone. He wasn't. He was flattering us shamelessly. And I thank God I don't live in a town which selects speakers on the basis of whether they agree with us on something irrelevant to the speech.

This town has stood for honest public speaking at least since the days of Anne Downer. I'm saddened the town's fundamental values are being cast aside by bigots who probably pontificate about "progressivism"