Sleeping rough - what a laugh!

It seems not a day can be allowed to go by without Cameroonite social consciences being rolled out as if to prove the Tin Man has found a heart.

The latest piece of not-so-subtle ‘brand repositioning’ will see Tory housing spokesman, Grant Schapps, take to the streets of London in a bid to ‘gain a better idea of what life is like for homeless people’, reports this morning’s Observer.

Schapps, who sounds like a playboy from an Agatha Christie novel, will ‘spend Christmas Eve visiting homeless centres run by the Thames Reach charity. Then he will head off to the Victoria Street area to find suitable material for a bed and a comfortable place to sleep.’

“I am reliably told that cardboard and newspapers are two vital elements of good insulation,” quipped the Tory no-mark.

Now, I have never had the misfortune to sleep rough. But I can imagine how it feels: fucking cold and miserable.

And people like me, with the imagery of Thatcher's 'Cruel Britannia' burned into our souls, will need no reminding of “cardboard cities” as the vulnerable, destitute and mentally-ill were left to the elements, freezing to death in shop doorways.

I also seem to recall Matthew Parris, the overrated Times hack, trying a similar stunt a generation ago when he nominally laboured as a Conservative MP. Other similarly publicity-hungry Tories have camped out too, just to show its not all bad sleeping under the stars.

But of course we're not fooled. WCH remains in the mould of that other great Working Class Hero, Aneurin Bevan, who infamously proclaimed in 1948 that “no attempt at either ethical or social seduction can eradicate from my heart a deep, burning hatred of the Tory party.”

“So far as I am concerned” the great man intoned, “they are lower than vermin.”

And despite Cameron’s cosmetic conversion to the human race, and silly stunts from Schapps, they still are.

My only hope is that a bunch of braying, boozed-up bovver boys piss all over Shapps as he sleeps. That would be an eloquent riposte to this latest gimmick by David Cameron's Conservatives.

Happy Christmas one and all – so long as you’re not a Tory rat.

WCH