Cameron throwing his toys out of the pram

David Cameron appears to be close to throwing his toys out of the pram.

As we approach polling day and the polling data keeps piling up, the possibility of a hung parliament (and all that entails) still looms large.

If there is a hung parliament, the basic point remains that Gordon Brown will still be Prime Minister on Friday morning. And David Cameron is none too happy about that, going so far as to say the Tories will ignore the guidelines the Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service has drawn up.

As Sunder Katwala over at Liberal Conspiracy points out, the Conservative approach to a hung parliament is essentially to overlook the will of the electorate and say they’re in power anyway.

Thus, the toys are firmly out of the pram.

But this is part of a whole series of incidents which indicate to me David Cameron’s contempt of constitutional and procedural practice in order to further his ambitions for power. He suggests shamefully populist policies that ride roughshod over established convention (such as suggesting any non-elected Prime Minister has to hold an election with 6 months) and poorly thought through electoral reforms (such as equal constituency sizes).

He also took the liberty of making his speech on the day the election was announced before the election was even announced by the Prime Minister (see the timings on the Guardian's liveblog from the day here).

This drive to seize power come what may, and in the face of a system of government that has stood up pretty well to the challenges it has faced in, say, the last 300 years, is pretty arrogant.

But what’s amusing about it (if such a thing could be thought of as amusing), is that Cameron is only in this position because of himself. In September 2008, his party was 28 points ahead in one poll. In the face of this government’s apparently discredited economic management, the fact that Britain is ‘broken’ and Gordon Brown is supposedly one of the most unpopular modern Prime Ministers, the fact that David Cameron hasn’t sealed the deal with the electorate is, frankly, astonishing.

Rather than looking around at the constitution and established practice as the answer to his power-seeking woes, therefore, perhaps he needs to look a little closer to home?