Unlucky?

As Richard from EUReferendum rightly points out, since the phone hacking scandal has emerged the MSM have gone from; "Cameron is a legend in his own lifetime" to "er... perhaps he's a bit crap after all". Of course any sensible person was never taken in by Cameron from the start.

Conservative Home has a different theory on Cameron's current difficulties - it's all about luck. Tim Montgomerie insists that Cameron is not an incompetent idiot (to put it mildly) but instead he's...wait for it... unlucky (I can hear the violins now). In the beginning according to the gospel of TM "Poor ol' Cameron" started off by being lucky:

I've always thought that, on balance, Cameron has been lucky. He's certainly been lucky in his opponents. David Davis in the 2005 Tory leadership contest ran a very uninspiring and complacent campaign and he's never faced a serious competitor to his party leadership since. More significantly Cameron took over as Leader of the Opposition when Tory-killer Tony Blair was on the way out. He's since faced Brown and Miliband as Labour leaders. Neither come close to possessing the magic of Blair.

He's right that Brown didn't have the magic that Blair did, which is somewhat of an understatement. Brown not only lacked the 'magic', he was one of the most incompetent unsuited and unpopular leaders in history. Labour's poll rating was worse than under Michael Foot. So in that sense Cameron was lucky with his opponent, which rather begs the obvious question; why didn't he win the election? The Conservatives should have trounced Labour - they didn't. Lucky? Hmm!

Then TM uses an article in the Independent to argue:

...that events have been very unlucky for Cameron...

That depends on your definition of unlucky. Many of course would argue that you make your own luck. It can be argued that this is unlucky or accidently stepping on a 3-pin plug is unfortunate but it is not unlucky to deliberately get close to News International at a time when phone hacking was an issue that had been known since 2005, and that Cameron had repeatedly been warned over Andy Coulsen. That's not unlucky but a fundamental demonstration of poor judgement.

In truth Cameron is an unprincipled, shallow, vacuous, power-hungry tosspot and the likes of TM, Conservative voters and Cameron deserve each other. The tragedy is the rest of us don't deserve any of it: it's us that are the real unlucky ones.