NOW? YOU'VE ALL BEEN TORIES SINCE TONY WON:

So are we all tories now? (Carole Cadwalladr, 8/03/08, The Observer)

This is blitzkrieg, total warfare and, last week, the Panzer divisions of the ideological wing of the Conservative party managed to take the equivalent of Poland, claiming for themselves not only the entire British seaside but also the Smiths, Radiohead and Gorillaz. For as well as trouncing Gordon in the first inaugural Fake Holiday Photo Op head-to-head, Cameron also presented a selection of his favourite CDs, to Barack Obama, and in so doing branded them with the Conservative stamp.

But then, increasingly, what isn't? Everything that I, as a paid-up, Guardian-reading, organic muesli-eating, Red Ken-voting, farmers' market-visiting, lentil-cooking, metropolitan-living, city cyclist, hold dear - being nice to battery chickens and veal calves, buying fish that has been caught by a grizzled old man using nothing more technologically advanced than a bit of a string, buying only the most humanitarian coffee beans known to man - suddenly all these things seem to have become not only part of the Conservative party manifesto but also, and believe me, it pains me to say this, posh.

It's like the Twilight Zone. I'm wondering if my brain was accidentally switched by aliens for, say, Kirsty Allsopp's? Or did the entire country fall on its head and start seeing things funny? Because one minute, the bicycles and the muesli and the lentils were all manifestations of a certain home-spun knit-your-own-hemp-socks leftiedom as practised by what the Daily Mail used to call the tofu classes. And the next you're reading an interview with David Cameron in the Daily Mail and there he is saying that he knits his own hemp socks and actually bathes in organic tofu.

Or near enough. And it's just so confusing. Because back in the days when Tories charged around in their 4x4s and shot things out of hedgerows, you could just ignore them and know you never wanted to be one of them. Bloodsports and ridiculous young toffs were Tories.

Meanwhile, on this side of the pond, Senator Obama is fighting off the charge that he's posh because it's radioactive.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 3, 2008 8:07 PM