Platitudes heaped on dishonesty

David Cameron is "angry" and has let it be known "in no uncertain terms" that one of his peers spoke his mind. At no time does it appear that boy consider that what Lord Mancroft had said was empirical truth. What is important is that it should not have been said.

Cameron was talking today in Wales when he rounded on the peer after Mancroft had described the nurses that he had experienced whilst in hospital recently in a speech in the Lords,

"The nurses, who probably are the most important people in this complex area, were what I would describe as an accurate reflection of many young women in Britain today. What do I mean by that? I shall now break your Lordships’ rules and read the next bit, because I thought very hard before I wrote it. The nurses who looked after me—not all of them; we should never generalise and there were one or two wonderful ones—were mostly grubby, with dirty fingernails and hair. They were slipshod, lazy and, worst of all, drunken and promiscuous. How do I know that? If you are a patient, lying in a bed and being nursed from either side, the nurses talk across you as if you are not there. I know exactly what they got up to the night before. I know how much they drank and what they were planning to do the next night, and it was pretty horrifying".

The fact that Mancroft is a decent civilised man with a long and nationally recognised interest in health issues is of course unimportant. The fact that from the speech in its entirety it is obvious that he was not speaking from malice, but from deep concern.

But that is unacceptable in Cameron world. The empirical evidence of your own eyes is as nothing next to the repetition of polite nostrums and political shibboleths. Nurses are 'angels of mercy' particularly if they work in the state sector. Contrary evidence must not be aired and the public must never be informed that things are not perfectly rosey inthe garden.

After all if they were, or more to the point if the elite admitted it there would be demands from the people these services are supposed to be provided for, for far more radical solutions than those on offer. Solutions that none in the big three are prepared to contemplate.

That Mr Cameron's speech was about "Mending broken politics", makes me laugh.

He said there was a breakdown of public faith in the political system, with a need to end spin, directly engage the public and "mend broken politics".

Directly engaging with reality would be exactly how to start the process, but acording to him to do so makes him angry.