The British Election

Steyn in the Telegraph:

John Kerry's problem last November was that he wasn't Tony Blair. Had the Democrats managed to find a candidate who was fierce and clear-sighted on the war but a big nanny-state control-freak on health, education and all the other pantywaist stuff, they might well have pulled it off. Iraq wasn't going so well, if only in media terms; Mr Bush was a controversial figure; and, for all the weary repetition of the allegedly inviolable rule that "Americans don't switch commanders-in-chief in the middle of a war", recent history suggests that wartime presidencies usually cease well before the hostilities do (Johnson and Truman).

Conversely, Michael Howard's problem is that he isn't George W Bush. I don't mean that he needs to be the swaggering Texan cowboy of Guardian cartoons, but that he should have run as Governor Bush did in 2000, back when he was a "compassionate conservative". Many of us uncompassionate conservatives felt rather queasy whenever young Dubya used the phrase, but he made it sound like a bold principled position, usually adding, "and on this ground I will make my stand!" Listening to him, you couldn't help noticing the ground seemed pretty soft and that, after just a couple of minutes alongside him in his bog of clichés, your boots were beginning to squelch.

What happened to the Tory Party? Is no one electable in Britain even remotely conservative?