IT'S MY BALL: REPORTS FROM THE PLAYGROUND PART I

David Cameron has a temper, this much is public knowledge, and whilst loosing ones temper might not be the most endearing of characteristics it is at least a sign of the beating of a human heart.
There is however another form that loosing your temper takes and that is petulance. Often rooted in arrested development it is not only unattractive but grotesque in a grown man. The analogy most often given is with the little boy, who feeling the game slipping away from him, angrily picks up the ball declaring “it’s my ball and I'm going home now.”
It's my Ball!
This was precisely the stance that David Cameron took after he lost the vote on Syria just over a week ago. He need not have called a vote at that stage, recalling parliament wholly unnecessary and premature. Had he waiting for further evidence, had President Obama’s course of action become clearer, he might have won the vote in form he presented. Even in the circumstances of the lost vote he could still have swallowed his pride and supported the Labour amendment, which would have provided him with the room for manoeuvre he needed. But no, it was his ball and if we were not going to play his way we were not going to play at all.
If this concerned anything less serious than the situation in Syria it would merely be pathetic; as things stand it represents the tragic and catastrophic miscalculation of a man out of his depth, immature and inexperienced.
Even more pathetic, like a child whose weakness has been exposed in the playground, he shouts at Miliband across the dispatch box “weak, weak!” This led to his highly comic chastisement by the BBC’s political correspondent, speaking to him like a teacher upbraiding a naughty child. “You loosing the vote was not Ed Miliband’s fault was it, you have to take responsibility.”

The general consensus seems to be that Ed Miliband and the Labour party have come well out of this affair. This may be true in the short term, however as Britain is sidelined and more atrocities occur in Syria the British public may, ashamed of their former support for non intervention, turn on the Labour party. After Munich Chamberlain was cheered to the rafters, one year later his name was mud, he had become a despised man.



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