The Aristocratic Oedipus Complex: What David Cameron's Spat with His Mum Tells Us About the Government

So there's clearly something going on between David Cameron and his mother. Last month, the octogenarian Mary Cameron drew some attention when she signed a petition against cuts to child services imposed by her own son's government. (Cameron's aunt, meanwhile, actually took part in a protest against the same cuts.) Mary Cameron had a good reason to oppose austerity – she works at an Oxfordshire children's centre. Soon to be past tense: her efforts were unsuccessful, and the centre is now closing; the Prime Minister's policies have essentially put his own mother out of a job. She is, as she told the Mirror, "very sad".

Strange behaviour for the leader of a party so committed to family values to go about upsetting his own mother. But you can imagine the young Cameron, during his long unwitting rehearsal for the Bullingdon Club, practicing his preteen tyranny in front of a long-suffering Mary: smashing porcelain plates, screaming at all hours, demanding to breastfeed well into double-digit age and biting when she lets him. Cameron has always radiated the sense that he was born to rule, and people who think like that tend to have unpleasant childhoods.

It's not Oedipal, exactly, it's revenge; the Prime Minister reducing his mother to the status of just another voiceless pleb, signing petitions against the government that do exactly nothing, losing her job for no good reason. The Oedipus complex is, for the most part, a bourgeois phenomenon: it's structured around the basic family unit, daddy-mummy-me, a triad mostly found in respectable but unspectacular urban homes, polite to the neighbours but distant, aware of the past but detached.

The Camerons are a very different type of family. They're directly descended from King William IV. The Prime Minister's own grandfather was a baronet. Really posh people don't really have families, they have lineages: the immediate libidinal attachments aren't with their distantly immediate relatives but the oil paintings in the drawing room, fleshily familiar faces that lived hundreds of years ago. Women disappear in these lineages; they silently, patiently reproduce the line, while every new scion experiences its subject-formation through its relation to men. If there is an aristocratic Oedipus, it's reversed: the child wants to possess the father, and overthrow the mother. And this is how you get Tory policies, which do tend to disproportionately affect women.

I think this is a persuasive theory, and it might be true. But much of the gleeful coverage of the closure of Chieveley and Area Children's Centre has ignored the fact that there was a third Cameron objecting to the cuts in Oxfordshire: the Prime Minister himself.

Letters leaked last November show an increasingly irate David Cameron remonstrating with Oxfordshire council against the "significant cuts to frontline services – from elderly day centres, to libraries, to museums", in addition to the "unwelcome and counter-productive proposals to close children's centres across the county", despite the fact that there's only been a "slight fall in government grants". In fact, as Tory councillor Ian Hudspeth responds, funding had been cut by 37 percent.

This is all deeply weird. Cameron spends much of his time almost gloating at the depth and severity of the cuts he's imposing in search of a chimerical fiscal balance. He must know that these cuts are a disaster for the arts and culture and that they disproportionately affect the most vulnerable in society, because on any given Saturday there are 20,000 people marching through central London to tell him so. But here he is, aghast that Oxfordshire isn't "following the best practice of Conservative councils from across the country and making back-office savings while protecting the frontline".

But in a way it makes sense. This is disavowal, the mind's ability to simultaneously hold two contradictory positions, the infant's response to the lack of a maternal phallus: "I know very well… but at the same time…" Cameron knows that his policies have been disastrous for vast swathes of the country, but it doesn't matter, it's happening to other people, and for the milk-fed Tory narcissist, other people aren't entirely real. He can maintain the fantasy that all his cuts are just forcing local councils to streamline their bureaucracies, until the same thing starts happening to his constituency, to his mum, and it becomes real. And once you start looking, you can see this same neurosis unfolding all across the government.

Last year, for instance, the Department of Work and Pensions attempted to resolve this contradiction by inventing people to benefit from its benefits sanctions. In a leaflet, stock photos were used to illustrate fictional stories from claimants who never existed, explaining (essentially) that they were pathetic worms who needed to be punished, and that having their only source of income withdrawn really helped them get back on their feet. And they're still at it: last week, Iain Duncan Smith claimed that "75 percent of those who have been sanctioned all say it suddenly helped them focus and get on". This is, as far as anyone can tell (the Labour party is trying to refer the claim to the UK Statistics Authority), absolutely untrue. But did he believe it?

These people aren't wilfully lying, exactly, but neither are they just innocently incorrect. Between ideological imperatives and the mad buzzing nest of confused longings that constitutes the human mind, there's a disconnect: the government has lost touch with reality. It's almost more comforting to believe that the Tory front bench are motivated by a desire to see their own parents suffering – we might be ruled by sadists, but at least their sadism is minimally efficient. The truth is far more disturbing. They're evil, they're idiots; they know exactly what they're doing, they know nothing at all; they're responsible statesmen, they're terrified infants, clawing for the nearest nipple.

@sam_kriss

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