Bruce Anderson Should be Pensioned Off

Bruce Anderson has never been a columnist I've either liked or felt I had to read. He's certainly not in the class of Matthew Parris, Michael Brown or Peter Oborne. And his fatuous effort in yesterday's Independent confirmed my view of him. To his credit he was one of the first to identify David Cameroon's potential as a Tory leader, but his subsequent slavish adoration of all things Cameroon has made him look so ridiculous that you wondered if he had a picture of Dave over his bed. Let's not take that thought any further...

But yesterday he took things one step too far. He took Tory Party Chairman Francis Maude to task over the 'A' List and concluded his article (if it can be called that) by calling on David Cameron to sack Francis Maude. His reason? He alleges that Francis Maude has "come to blame the Tory political culture of the 1980s for his brother's death...Francis Maude seems to wish to take revenge for his family's problems on the Tory faithful. David Cameron wanted an 'A' List in order to encourage women. Mr Maude wanted to use the 'A' List to humiliate the traditional Tory Party".

I almost want to apologise to Francis Maude for having to repeat that rubbish here, but for some reason the media take Bruce Anderson seriously. Surely to God this passage ought to make some people revise their opinion. The man is nothing but an oaf and is not known as "Brute" for nothing. During the Tory leadership contest his vehement diatribes against David Davis perplexed even DD's bitterest enemies. Perhaps this little snippet from The Guardian may shed some light...

Why this uncharacteristic animosity to the likely next number one? Could it, as Davis supporters suspect, have something to do with an incident when John Major put his leadership on the line and asked his MPs to re-elect him? When the man who is known to all as "the brute" turned up uninvited at a meeting of Major supporters, not it seemed to them in the first full flush of sobriety, and made himself such a nuisance that he had to be ejected - a task assigned to the only former SAS man present, Davis?

So having been thrown out into the street by David Davis, Anderson got his revenge. I wonder what it was that Francis Maude did to upset him. Whatever it was, good on Francis. He rises in my estimation. Perhaps Bruce Anderson could try in the future to write a column free of personal rancour or revenge. But then again, pigs might fly. Anderson has reached his sell-by date. Quite how the article in The Independent got past the editor is a mystery, but if anyone on the Indy thinks that Anderson's articles are taken seriously by most thinking people on the right, they're very much mistaken. Time to pension the old brute off.

UPDATE: Just had this from a correspondent. Re: the Guardian snippett - Funnily enough, he burst into a Cameroon gathering in DC's office (immediately after the final MPs' ballot) in a similar state...