[andrewb]

Originally Posted by shakermaker

Finally, the NME years itself away from the Arctic Monkeys weekly image it has had for so long & got something spot on right.

"What has been rock's most bizarre moment in 2006? Pete Doherty and a syringe? Arctic Monkeys madness? The Embrace football song? Nope, that accolade goes to Conservative Party Leader David Cameron's attempts to go indie.

In an echo of Blair's cool Britannia - when the newly appointed PM invited Noel Gallagher, Alan McGee and the crème of Britpop round for tea at Downing St - the Tory leader has spent the past six months trying to rebrand himself as a hip new politician for the 21st century. Out went the tie and the gas-guzzling car; on went a pair of Converse and the bike clips.

Such was his enthusiasm to cover all bases from Heat to NME, he begged himself invites to the V Festival and Victoria Beckham's World Cup bash, co-opted Bob Geldof into his Globalization and Global Policy group and claimed Radiohead played 'Fake Plastic Trees' just for him during a charity show. Radiohead rushed, horrified, to deny this.

...Asked at a magazine editors conference about knife crime, he launched into a tirade against black music and in doing so explosed himself as the right-wing, narrow-minded Tory he'd been trying so hard to conceal. "I would say to Radio 1, do you realise the stuff you play on saturday nights encourages people to carry guns and knives?" he said.

Is this why Conservatives have a 10 point lead on Labour now?
Is this what we want?
Are we a nation of masochists?
Yeah, it's really trendy for liberals to moan about Blair right now - mainly because Bush mugged us into supporting the 'war on terror' - but do you really think the Conservative party are going to make things any better?
If David Cameron is to be the next PM and solve our social ills, then surely, he needs to come up with a more original rap than this.
OK, he likes Arctic Monkeys and The Smiths - big whup. That's like saying you like 'sunshine'.
It doesn't make you eligible to lead us into a third world war and it certainly doesn't qualify you to start meddling in a world you know nothing about."

Read the full article in this week's NME...

What a complete load of utter rubbish. Did you suddenly expect someone whos well spoken to simply listen to opera and nothing else? To try and say hes vote winning by giving his music tastes (regardless of the selective fact taking of your post and NME's, since they only mention the 'popular' music he mentions, not all) is ludicrous. Heck is he trying to win the votes of disabled people by talking about his disabled child, no he isn't. Get real.

Oh and, on a further note, if people actualy vote based upon the music tastes of a given leader, well, that just speaks for itself dosn't it.