IT WOULD be curiously refreshing to encounter a Conservative Prime Minister who pledged to act like, well … a proper Tory. For many years now we have observed Conservative leaders on the steps of Number 10 looking all beatific and vowing to be kinder and more compassionate than Mother Teresa.

After Margaret Thatcher won the 1979 General Election you could be forgiven for wondering if she wasn’t also bidding to lead a family of singing children over the Austrian Alps. “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony,” she said. “Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.”

David Cameron borrowed the same messianic phraseology in 2010. “I want to make sure my government always looks after the elderly, the frail and the poorest,” he said. In July, his successor Theresa May also insisted on channelling her inner Franciscan. “The government I lead will be driven not by the interests of a privileged few, but by yours,” she said. “David Cameron has led a one-nation government, and it is in that spirit that I also plan to lead.”

At this rate the next Conservative Prime Minister will be handing out loaves and fishes and pledging to drive out demons.

Thatcher, of course, instead of bringing truth, faith, harmony and hope instead brought discord, doubt and despair. She punished the working-class communities and the industries that sustained them by laying waste to them all while pretending to elevate their social status by giving them the right to buy their own council houses. In this way she used them as a means of lining the pockets of an engorged financial services industry and initiating the long, slow decline of social housing in the United Kingdom.

She waged a needless war in the South Atlantic and hitched her wagon to that of mad Ronald Reagan, the most dangerously reactionary president in recent American history. Her so-called economic miracle was achieved by siphoning oil tax receipts from the North Sea and squandering it on paying off the miners. Public assets were sold off as Britain became a nation powered by a spiv elite living in one square mile of London.

Cameron was no different; he merely seemed a bit more human and a bit less hectoring. His decision yesterday to bring the curtain down on his parliamentary career was met by the political equivalent of a barely discernible ripple of applause.

He seemed to be a decent enough cove but, like every other Conservative Prime Minister there has ever been, you always got the impression that at the heart of everything he did was a requirement to maintain the hegemony of a tiny group of anointed citizens while pretending to work for the Common Good.

THUS the financial crisis (which admittedly he inherited) was to be tackled by making the most vulnerable in our society pay. At the same time tax breaks and advantages were handed out to those firms who had paid the most into Tory coffers or lobbied the hardest after bidding hundreds of thousands of pounds for Theresa’s kitten heels or lunch with Boris.

Europe of course was his final undoing, but it was a disaster all of his own making. He had failed to stand up properly to the Blimp faction in his party and pandered to UKIP, a deeply unpleasant and xenophobic pressure group. Instead he played dice with the country’s economic future by using Europe as a bargaining chip with which to deal with the Lib-Dems, whom he expected to be his junior coalition partners once more in 2015. He could hardly complain when Boris Johnson and Michael Gove similarly gambled with our EU membership merely to advance their careers in government. This was never about doing what was best for Britain but only what was best for the upper echelons of the Tory Party.

The new boundary changes which he drove and which were announced yesterday characterised his entire reign. There is no problem with the concept of updating our constituency map occasionally to ensure that it keeps pace with a rapidly-changing country. Cameron’s changes though, could potentially disenfranchise millions of voters and leaves students and residents of urban, working class areas prey to the re-casting of boundaries. Like his proposed restrictions on trade union funding the new boundary proposals are designed to hit the Labour Party. They are the embodiment of the historic sense of entitlement and of governing in the exclusive interests of those at the top of society.

He committed the exchequer of an economically hard-pressed country to spending billions more on weapons of mass destruction and gave the green light for Britain to participate in bombing a third world country by stealth. He mocked the democratically elected leader of the opposition for not dressing like a toff and for failing to be sufficiently obsequious to the head of a family which the state inexplicably permits to live in luxurious indolence. But hey, we had an Olympic Games and its legacy of gifting a football team of multi-millionaires a cut-price, luxury football stadium.

As such, he finally completed the equation that runs through every Tory administration since Walpole: Royal obsequiousness plus military adventures plus expensive sporting festivals equals the golden key to anaesthetising the masses as they are cheated and exploited.

Inadvertently though, Cameron may also have laid the foundations for a Yes vote whenever Nicola Sturgeon decides to take the plunge into a second referendum. For, during the first referendum, he successfully seduced an entire generation of naïve and unprincipled Scottish Labour figures to such an extent that, at the end of that campaign, it was sometimes difficult to identify where lay the line separating the People’s Party from the party of the elite. That did more than anything else to wound Labour in Scotland almost mortally and thus ensure that the momentum of the independence movement would continue.

The image of Cameron, hours after the referendum result, ripping up the flimsy parchment of The Vow and laughing at Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown, will help launch the second independence referendum. That will be his most abiding legacy.