My last post was loosely on the topic of how prescient I can be with hindsight. I was particularly miffed because I felt I had anticipated a particularly ludicrous government policy - as an aside, pedants, it is both the government and the policy that I think are ludicrous - but was unable to claim any kudos as I hadn't made the prediction public. This week, I feel slightly more smug.
Regular readers may be aware of a blog I wrote last year on the subject of Boris Jonson and David Cameron. Towards the end of the blog, I queried the now Prime Minister's professed love of the Smiths. I wouldn't want to question the man's integrity, but it has always struck me as odd. It's not so much the idea that he would listen to lyrics he would find it difficult to agree with that I find unlikely, but the idea of him enjoying a band whose whole aesthetic seems founded on a worldview he could not possibly share.
It seems that I am not alone. In the last two weeks, both Johnny Marr and Morrisey have attempted to forbid Mr Cameron from liking the band. Morrisey's comments are particularly pertinent: 'It was not for such people that either "Meat is Murder" or "The Queen is Dead" were recorded,' he writes. I don't like to think of people as types, but I think he sums the position up well. Cameron, I presume, came to the Smiths in his teens. This is an age in which music forms a huge part of many people's identity. In an era in which the country was divided, Cameron and the Smiths were most definitely on opposite sides of the fence.
Cameron is an intelligent man, and (as an Oxford undergraduate) must have been an intelligent teenager. How did he not realise that this band were speaking for people who were excluded from the life he and his Tory chums were enjoying? I'm glad that Morrisey and Marr seem to understand this, even if Cameron doesn't.
