The BBC said
David Cameron has told Conservatives to be the party of optimism, urging them to "let sunshine win the day".
And then said nothing further. This is remarkably obtuse and ignorant.
The whole point of Cameron's speech, as I understood it, was that Labour had good intentions, but bad underlying basic principles, which lead them to commit to decent ideas, but add a whole bunch of red tape and centralised targets that caused the whole project to fail.
And fair enough. Any LibDem candidate could have given most parts of Cameron's speech, and in an ideal world many Labour politicians would agree as well.
Unfortunately for Cameron, though, those parts of his speech where he set out his tent most explicitly, looking for the centre ground, were distinctly not applauded by the Conservative faithful. And when he felt he had to set out political specifics, to appease the masses, the contrast with his "there is such a thing as society, and we trust it" theme was striking.
But in any case, when someone's speech, having built up to this, ends up with a deliberate contrast between optimists (we trust local people) and pessimists (central Government must run and/or test everything), surely a decent journalist will at least try to bring up the main point of the speech?
