Could a Tory vote for Kerry?

[T_i_B]

Dunno if you lot can get the link for this but this is a whinge by a pro-Bush Tory MP about how unpopular $hrubya is amongst British conservatives and how much more popular amongst Tories Kerry would be. Make of this what you will.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/v3_entry_frames.htm

If Britain could vote this November, no one doubts what the result would be. Kerry would win by a landslide. He’d win votes across the board. Not just on the Left, but on the Right too. In fact, Kerry would probably get more votes in the Tory shires and suburbs than he would from Labour’s urban heartlands. Because here is the truth that dare not speak its name: many Conservatives don’t much like Bush.

Not all Conservatives. I’m a signed-up, card-carrying Bush fan. I have been ever since I met him when he was governor of Texas. So too is Michael Howard. He shares with George Dubya a passion for baseball. When they met on the recent state visit, they spent half their time poring over Major League batting averages. Then there’s William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith. The President made an effort to see both of them when he didn’t have to, so they like him too. But even among Conservative MPs, let alone with Conservative supporters in the country, it pains me to report that we Bushites are a minority.

This week I carried out my own focus group on the Tory benches in the House of Commons. Here’s what they think of the President — off the record, of course. ‘George Bush scares the hell out of me,’ said one MP. ‘Bush is a man who might wail at the Moon — I don’t feel comfortable with him, unlike Kerry,’ said another. ‘I take exception to the way Bush trashed Kyoto’ was what a Tory frontbencher told me. ‘Personally, I would vote for Bush but I think Anglo-American relations would be better if Kerry won’ was the assessment of another.

There’s George W. Bush’s use of language — not just the mangled sentences, but also the folksy evangelism and frontier cowboy talk. It plays well in the key swing states of Middle America but it frightens Middle England. Frankly, most Conservatives tend to like their politicians to sound a bit more pompous, a bit less dangerous and, yes, a bit more intelligent. Perhaps because we are supposed to be the Church of England at prayer, we Tories are also deeply suspicious of anyone who talks too much about their relationship with God — we all chuckled when Jeremy Paxman asked Tony Blair whether he prayed with George Bush. John Kerry’s Boston vowels and secular values are much more reassuring to Tory ears.