He disagreed with Lord Tebbit, Peter Hitchens and that anarchical prat, Paul Staines who called for the electorate to ditch their support for the main political parties as a means of registering their disgust and disapproval over MPs handling of our country and parliamentary expenses.

Conversely, Tim claimed that a large victory for the Conservative Party would accelerate momentum towards the end of the Blair and Brown years. He also commented that Cameron had acted decisively and with resolution over the MPs expenses scandal, and that the formation of a new Conservative-led coalition in the European Parliament would act as a serious opposition.

The other few reasons he gave amounted to little more than a ‘vote for us because the rest are worse’ – and there really is little merit in that line of persuasion. In fact, let us be honest, there really was little in the way of merit in any of his arguments at all.

For example, how exactly will a large vote for the Conservative Party at the European and local elections hasten the end of the Brown and Blair years? Since David Cameron, the self-proclaimed ‘Heir to Blair’, and the Conservative Party are pursuing policies that are virtually identical to that of New Labour, how is voting Conservative meant to be end the Brown and Blair years when politically they seek to continue them in terms of policy?

Furthermore, how exactly did David Cameron act with ‘resolution’ over MPs expenses? Like so many other MPs he too was caught with his hand in the jar, and he had never seriously complained about the purposefully deceptive system of expenses before.

Did Mr Cameron actually sack anyone that mattered or was not in a minor role? No. He simply asked Conservative MPs (and himself) to pay back the money they had immorally taken. This ‘pay it back and we’ll all just forget about it’ attitude is not what I would call ‘acting with resolution’ at all, despite what the media may say.

Finally, you cannot create any real opposition to the European project in the EU Parliament. It is the EU Commission that acts as the Executive and produces legislation. The Executive are not drawn from Parliament and therefore the EU Parliament cannot repeal EU laws or create them – only agree or disagree.

Thus MEPs and parties cannot fulfil their manifesto commitments because they do not have power or authority to execute their mandate. Therefore, having more Conservative MEPs in the EU Parliament arguing for ‘a freer and more decentralised Europe’ will not make the blindest bit of difference to the make-up of the EU. You cannot initiate real change from within the Parliament.

The Conservatives as a whole are not particularly interested in the issue of European Union any more. David Cameron has used the European elections campaign as a platform for national issues including calling for an immediate General Election and his attempted cover up of the MPs expenses scandal, rather than to discuss the Lisbon Treaty or loss of sovereignty to the EU. As Lord Tebbit suggests, do they really deserve our vote?

Lord Tebbit called for the electorate to withdraw their votes from the three main political parties at the European elections in June in order to send a message to those parties that their votes should not be taken for granted. He wrote:

Local elections, the great British public should treat just as normal but at the European elections, in my judgment they should send a very sharp message to the leaders of the three national parties by not voting for any of the national party candidates.

He went on to add in later interviews that the electorate should steer clear of voting for the socialist and racialist BNP, but other than that he did not mind who people voted for (or not at all), just that they didn’t vote Lib Dem, Labour or Conservative.

Even less than a decade ago this story would have caused a media storm. There would have been multiple front page news headlines detailing ‘furious’ Conservative splits over ‘Europe’ and the culturally leftist BBC would have had a field day.

Things though have since moved on. The Conservatives are still irrevocably split over the European Union, but the official media and political narrative has changed. Today’s official line is David Cameron good; Gordon Brown bad. In order to facilitate a change of Government, or rather Westminster administration, the media, having failed to make David Cameron popular, are now trying the other option which is to make Gordon Brown unpopular.

Therefore, any stories that might portray Cameron in a negative light are now willingly suppressed by the media. How else could one account for the complete lack of coverage over Lord Tebbit’s intervention, especially by the BBC, and the establishment papers of the Times and the Guardian?

It is not as though Lord Tebbit is a minor party figure either. As a former Chairman of the Conservative party and self appointed keeper of the Thatcherite flame, his comments carry weight within many circles and thus there is even more reason, one would have thought, for a fuss to be made about his public dissent.

During a press conference, David Cameron was asked about the action he would take over Lord Tebbit’s intervention. He said:

As a former party chairman, he should know a thing or two about party discipline and he should probably know a thing or two about the rules about supporting other parties. He was treading a very careful path and I would warn him, if he slips off that path he’s sitting as an independent.

Yet, as Cameron and his Conservative leadership well know, the party need Lord Tebbit more than they are prepared to publicly admit. Their pursuit of office lies in the knowledge that their core conservative vote must come out at the election and send them into office. If the party were to publicly ditch Lord Tebbit then this may act as a sudden wakeup call to tribal Conservative voters that perhaps their party is not quite what it may seem.

But how exactly can you vote for a change when the alternative is virtually identical? What exactly are David Cameron and the Conservative Party going to do that is fundamentally different to the current Labour administration?

The BBC article suggests that Conservative run councils will ‘keep council tax down’. Yet, what is really mean by this is that taxes will rise by less than under the current administration. How very considerate, but what of all those millions of people who wish that their taxes would actually go down, rather than up?

At the weekend Neil Parish, likely to be the next Conservative MP for Tiverton and Honiton, told me that the Conservatives, when in Government, can’t lower taxes in the face of terrible economic conditions. But is it really that they can’t, or won’t – and is it any wonder when the Conservatives have now largely accepted the economic and high taxation arguments of the Left?

David Cameron also said that the Conservative Party believes in localism. So do I, but I know that such a view is incompatible with our membership of the EU. Will David Cameron admit that?

What’s more, when eighty per cent plus of our regulations and new laws are dictated to us by the European Union, without scrutiny from our Parliament, then the main political parties have even less reason to be radically different from one another on a whole range of issues over which we no longer have any control.

Yet, even if David Cameron and the Conservatives win the next UK General Election (which is still not anywhere near as certain as the media would have you believe) then we will, by and large, end up with exactly the same government we have already. The personalities will change, the policies will not.

While both scandals undoubtedly serve to remind us and the electorate of how out of touch the political class are with the rest of the country – both morally and politically – this cannot, I think, necessarily be seen as entirely desirable.

In the few years leading up to the 1997 General Election, the Conservative Government of John Major was engulfed in scandal after scandal involving the sleazy activities of Tory backbenchers and Ministers. The bedroom antics and financial misdoings of MPs whom nobody had heard of previously were suddenly splashed all over the front pages of the daily newspapers.

It would be fair to say that all Governments who have been in office for any considerable length of time are susceptible to these scandals. This does not, of course, make it right that they should have been carried out by the individuals in question, but simply to say that such human and political failings will almost certainly happen under any Government of any party given enough time.

As it happens, the supposedly ‘whiter than white’ Labour party that followed the Conservative implosion and electoral landslide of 1997 was swiftly involved in its own set of financial and sexual scandals, with Robin Cook choosing to sack his wife at the airport after a phone call with Blair and later marrying his mistress, while Peter Mandelson was caught up in the Hinduja passport row.

Yet, with a change of Government, very little by comparison was made of these similar scandals in the mainstream media, and sleaze suddenly became politically unimportant again (to most journalists at least). This therefore suggests that sleaze only seems to matter when a Government is perceived to be doing a bad job. This was the case in the mid-nineties under John Major and is equally so now under the tenure of Gordon Brown.

However, more importantly, the cry of sleaze levelled at individual MPs and Governments can be used by the media as a means by which to allow the political opposition into office without ever having subjected them to reasoned or thorough scrutiny of policy.

In short it is an unreasoned, mindless frenzy. It happened in 1997 with very little public scrutiny of Labour’s policies under the leadership of Tony Blair, and it appears that something similar is happening again with the Labour Government and our Tory opposition under David Cameron. The effect will be that ‘real’ political issues will not be discussed (or often even aired) and that as a consequence no honest political choice will be given to the electorate – they will simply be voting on personalities.

During those early months Labour and Blair rode on the crest of a wave of optimism and goodwill from many cheering crowds of Union Jack waving British people. However, this initial euphoria was short-lived and the rest is history.

In ten years Blair presided over two unnecessary and futile wars in the Middle East, escalating (though often ignored) economic problems, the steady decline in our power of self-government and a rapid rise in political correctness among many, many other unpleasant facets stemming from his Labour administration.

And so now to America where Democrat, Barack Obama has convincingly won the US 2008 Presidential Race against John McCain – all to cheering crowds of star-spangled waving US citizens, much glee in the liberal-left media and on the promise of ‘change’, ‘hope’ and ‘optimism’. Does that sound familiar to you?

Before I continue, one thing that should first be noted is despite the election of Barack Obama, the democratic process in the United States must be applauded. While the US system is by no means perfect we must consider that in many respects the United States’ political system is far more democratic than our own and really does put us and many other nations to shame.

Those people that did not vote for the ‘right’ candidate will not be lined up at dawn against a wall and shot. Nor will they be asked by a group of unelected bureaucrats and politicians in Brussels to vote again and again until they get the ‘correct’ result. Nor indeed will US citizens be subjected to the laws and rules of unaccountable institutions they know nothing about.

The people of the United States of America elect their political representatives at all levels, and those representatives are accountable and responsible to those that elected them. Compare this with Britain and its one-sided relationship with the European Union and you begin to see the gaping divide between our nation (or rather EU member state) and the United States.

Barack Obama will be accountable to US citizens and if after four years they decide that they have had enough of him then they can remove him from power and replace him with someone else. Can the same be said of our real Government in Brussels in the UK? Of course not.

Returning again to the soon to be President Obama – I think that as with Tony Blair, his gloss will soon wear thin. Once he has to make some concrete decisions rather than hide behind a veil of secrecy and meaningless slogans then ordinary American attitudes towards him will soon change.

Obama is not the One or the Messiah – just a left-wing media product with nothing good to say at all. Time and history will tell, but as Enoch Powell famously said:

All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.

And let’s be honest – on that account I think Enoch Powell was entirely right. Soon the screaming crowds will disperse and all that will be left of Obama is a shell – broken and empty.

As had been predicted, Mr Davis comfortably won the poll by some fifteen thousand votes against an assortment of twenty seven candidates that conspicuously lacked any representation from the Labour party.

During the early hours and days of his resignation, Mr Davis stirred up quite a media and public storm. Across the country Conservative Associations received phone calls from members of the public telling of their support for David Davis and the issues of freedom despite never having voted Conservative.

However, come the day of the vote and result, the ever fickle media’s interest had worn away and very little was made of the result – which I suppose in part is unsurprising given that Mr Davis received no challenge from a Labour party candidate over the issues of freedom surrounding detention without charge.

As I commented previously, I suspect that David Cameron would have rather preferred to back the Government’s plans on detention without charge if he’d had the opportunity. However, I think it was very much down to David Davis’ actions that the Conservative party has now publicly pledged to do away with the legislation if it forms the next Westminster administration.

However, the Liberal Democrats share of the vote did also increase slightly despite the fact that they spent more time playing the man rather than the ball in what was for them a typically ‘negative’ by-election campaign.

While overall turnout fell it would appear that the Conservative vote held up reasonably well especially when considering that this was not a high profile by-election in the eyes of the national media in the same way as Crewe and Nantwich.

Much hard work and effort was put into this campaign by MPs and party activists who, much like David Cameron this morning, will no doubt be very pleased by this result as it vindicated their ‘positive’ campaigning approach without revealing actual policies.

This may hint that the Conservative voting electorate are in some respects optimistic that David Cameron will be more conservative in Government than he is saying he will be in opposition.

In part this is because the result is practically a foregone conclusion. The Conservatives have held the seat since 1910 and at the last General Election, Boris Johnson held a comfortable majority of over twelve thousand.

While William Hague has been doing the rounds on the television networks saying that the Conservatives will take no vote for granted, Henley is still very much considered a Conservative safe seat by all parties and the majority of political activists.

With Labour out of the running and the Lib Dims highly unlikely to spring a surprise, the only thing left to watch for will be the turnout of Conservatives. If the Conservative vote in Henley drops badly as it did in Bromley then this will only go to prove correct the old mantra that it is Governments that lose elections rather than oppositions which win them.

Why, you may ask? Well, when I have been out canvassing in constituencies across the South West, the people I have met will say that they hate Labour and the Government and really want a change so they will vote Conservative next time around.

They won’t say that, yes, Dave’s the man or that they really agree with what the Conservatives are currently proposing (whatever we are proposing;) it is purely and simply that they want shot of the current Government and that voting Tory is the easiest way to achieve that aim – it is not to give a ringing endorsement of the Conservative party and its policies.

It was much the same in the lead up to the 1997 General Election. People really wanted rid of the Conservative Government and were therefore prepared to vote Labour whatever they were saying. However, in the decade since, a few people have become slightly more cynical and I would say that the ‘goodwill’ shown to Blair was greater than that currently shown towards our man David Cameron.

As I said, if the Conservative vote in Henley collapses or drops off dramatically then it will only highlight that there is no real reason to currently endorse the Conservatives alone in an election when Labour or the Government cannot be noticeably punished.

By actually coming up with some decent, popular policies we could really gain the support of the electorate at large and stimulate them into voting Conservative at by-elections and at a General Election. However, for the moment at least, David Cameron’s Conservatives are keeping quiet. We shall see what the next year and a half brings.