Can we clone Tony Abbott, please?

Melanie Phillips

Something truly astounding has happened. The best political candidate for a country's future has won a general election.

Even more astonishing is the fact that this achievement was something David Cameron and his inner circle had given us to believe was as impossible as . . . well, being reincarnated as an olive.

So what is this miracle? That a true conservative has won a general election on true conservative principles.

This has just occurred in Australia, where the leader of the Liberal (conservative) Party, Tony Abbott, has been elected Prime Minister by a landslide.

As head of the Liberal/National coalition, he unseated a Labour government which had been in power since 2007.

But here's the rub: Mr Abbott stands for all the things which, in this country, the Cameroons repeatedly claimed would make the Conservative Party unelectable.

An Oxford-educated devotee of the late Lady Thatcher, Mr Abbott wants to cut taxes and is against gay marriage, thinks man-made global warming theory is bunkum, wants to reduce immigration, and intends to end increases in overseas aid.


He also displays a robust understanding of the current threats to the West, and just who are its true allies and true enemies.

His views would not only make the UK's armchair appeasement tendency choke over its rhubarb crumble but also discomfit the current would-be saviours of Syria in the White House and No 10 Downing Street.

For unlike President Obama and Mr Cameron, the new Australian PM understands that, in Syria, the alternative to the bad guys may be even worse guys.

Needless to say, on account of Mr Abbott's views, the usual suspects (yes, they have them Down Under, too) duly wrote him off as unelectable and tried to finish him politically through scorn, insults and abuse.
He was called the 'mad monk' (he once trained to become a Catholic priest), 'Putin-esque' and 'misogynist and sexist' (that particular smear fell from the lips of Australia's then Labour Prime Minister, Julia Gillard).

He is none of those things. I have met him a couple of times. He is funny, clever, thoughtful and considerate. Now, after the election, he's had the last laugh.
  True, he was up against a Labour Party busily committing electoral suicide through internal divisions, broken promises and general incompetence (sound familiar?)

But unlike the British Cameroons – who bizarrely decided that, faced with the similar electoral meltdown of the Labour government under Gordon Brown, they nevertheless had to adopt Left-wing policies – Mr Abbott stuck to his conservative guns.

This meant that, unlike the poor old British electorate who were faced with a choice between Left-wing, very Left-wing and off the graph altogether Left-wing (you can decide for yourselves which party fitted which description), the Australians were presented with a clear choice of government.

Moreover, people positively respect principle, which they associate with courage and straightforwardness.

These characteristics produce, in turn, a measure of trust and respect, even from political opponents. This all leads to success at the ballot box. Who can be surprised by any of this?

Only the Cameroons, paralysed as they are by the fashionable prejudices aired at metropolitan dinner tables and the terror of getting on the wrong side of the BBC sneerocracy.

Even worse than that, they appear to have been influenced by the loathing the Left displays for them. Or maybe they have absorbed the views of some of their wives, as we are told happens in the Cameron household where the progressively-minded SamCam is said regularly to bend her husband's ear.

History is littered with examples of great men who made catastrophic errors of judgment because they didn't have the cojones to stand up to a woman with a hold over them.

Whatever the reason, the Cameroons have staked out positions which make then indistinguishable from the Left.

They are then mystified that they can't seem to win elections. In desperation, they grab hold of a few right-wing policies - and become even more mystified when the public promptly condemn them as insincere.

Yet evidence is all around them that conservative principles actually do win elections. Stephen Harper has shown that repeatedly as Canada's Prime Minister, as did Mr Abbott's Australian mentor John Howard, who won four general elections in a row.

And at home, this is precisely where UKIP's appeal also lies.

Tony Abbott is a 'conviction politician', with a strong moral sense rooted in his religious faith.

Indeed, while his social conservatism has made him a boo-figure for the Left, more thoughtful observers realise that it is those very same conservative principles which provide him with the compassionate edge which the Cameroons have so desperately tried to adopt.

What they didn't realise was that striking shallow poses over such fetishes as man-made global warming, gay marriage or international aid was not compassionate at all - quite the reverse, in fact.

Adopting positions which distort scientific, social or political evidence in order to support an unchallengeable belief sets one social group against another, supports the victory of the strong over the weak and replaces truth with ideological dogma.

In other words, this pseudo-compassion (which the Left wears on its sleeve to proclaim its own virtue) is actually responsible for creating a more brutalised, selfish and irresponsible society.

By comparison, Mr Abbott's beliefs are sincere; he lives a compassionate life – for example, doing community work among Aboriginal Australians to improve their lot.

And while he opposes gay marriage, he has a lesbian sister who has campaigned for him – thus giving the lie to the calumny that anyone opposing gay marriage is a bigot who poses a threat to homosexuals.

Above all, however, he is patriotic. That does not mean he indulges in sentimentalised lists of Australian achievements (in the way Mr Cameron did last week with regard to Britain's successes after a jibe from the Russians about us being a 'small island').

It means he always puts his country's national interest first. You could never imagine Tony Abbott surrendering Australia's ability to govern itself to some supra-national entity, as did British governments with the EU.

Nor claiming he would restore that sovereignty, then backing away from that undertaking, as Mr Cameron has done.

In other words, in a world made super-cynical by the supreme slipperiness of politicians, Mr Abbott is as solid as they come.

By sticking to what he believes through thick and thin, he has shown he is not motivated by the desire to win power just for power's sake – the characteristic with which David Cameron is associated and which repels so many voters.

In addition, Mr Abbott did not buckle under the volleys of insults and brickbats hurled his way. He has thus achieved something rather more remarkable than just a general election victory.

He has faced down the intellectual thuggery and demonisation by the Left, and shown that a politician who refuses to be cowed by this apparently all-encompassing intimidation can win big.

Mr Cameron has congratulated the new Australian Prime Minister-elect, saying it would be 'great to work with another centre-right leader'.

One does wonder whether Mr Abbott sees Mr Cameron the same way. For the British PM has done everything he can to damn the positions Mr Abbott takes as being in 'closet racist, fruitcake' territory.

Not surprisingly, however, some Tory MPs have got the point and are calling on Mr Cameron to adopt similar policies.

After all, look at what Mr Abbott promises to do. Axe the carbon tax. Reduce overseas aid. Limit immigration. Cut taxes. Invest in infrastructure. And he is a passionate Anglophile (another difference from many British politicians!).

In short, Britain has every reason to be envious of its Aussie friends. Can we clone Tony Abbott, please, and put him into Number 10 forthwith?