Britain's Cameron under attack from own party - The Province

LONDON - British Prime Minister David Cameron faced signs of unrest from within his own Conservative party on Sunday after the ruling coalition took a beating in mid-term elections.

Outspoken lawmaker Nadine Dorries said Cameron could be removed, and others from the right wing of the party also went on the attack after voters suffering from a double-dip recession switched to the Labour opposition.

"Unless there is a dramatic change of tack, it is almost certain that David Cameron and George Osborne will be replaced within a year," Dorries wrote in the Mail on Sunday newspaper.

Dorries - dubbed "Mad Nad" in the British press for her colourful views - said party chiefs needed only 46 signatures to replace the prime minister and chancellor and would get them by Christmas.

"Their downfall will have been brought about by arrogance and a sneering disregard for true Conservative values," she wrote.

Dorries' attack was the second in two weeks after she branded the pair "two posh boys who don't know the price of milk." Both Cameron and Osborne come from aristocratic roots.

Capping the worst month of Cameron's two years in power, Labour took control of 32 councils in Friday's elections and won more than 800 seats at the expense of the Conservatives and their coalition partners the Liberal Democrats.

Finance minister George Osborne insisted the government would "learn" from the elections, the only bright spot in which was the re-election of Conservative London mayor Boris Johnson.

"Let me take it on the chin. Last week's elections produced a tough result for the government at a tough time for the country," Osborne wrote, also in the Mail on Sunday.

Osborne also tried to distance the Conservatives from coalition plans to reform the House of Lords, parliament's upper house, and to legalise gay marriage.

"I think what people are saying is focus on the things that really matter, focus on the economy and on education and welfare," Osborne told the BBC.

Osborne apologised for the presentation of his widely criticised recent budget, in which he announced a top-level tax cut as well as an addition of value-added tax (VAT) to the price of some hot snacks.

The gay marriage and Lords reform plans are unpopular with much of the Conservative party, and Cameron has been urged to return to key "Tory" values.

Veteran Conservative lawmaker Brian Binley said Sunday that Cameron should "wake up and smell the coffee," while another, Bob Stewart, called for some "sanity" in next Wednesday's Queen's Speech.

The speech is delivered by Queen Elizabeth II in parliament but it is written by the government to set out their plans for the coming session of parliament.

Richard Ryder, who was chief whip for former Conservative prime minister John Major, urged Cameron to develop "strategy and vision."

Cameron "seems to lack coherence, so nobody knows what he stands for, what his beliefs are, what his convictions are," Ryder said.

Cameron's decision to stand by the government's austerity strategy despite fears that it is undermining growth, and to cut taxes for on top-bracket earners, has compounded the coalition's unpopularity.

In the elections the Conservatives also found themselves squeezed from the right by the anti-Europe UK Independence Party (UKIP) - a toxic development as the Conservatives have traditionally been divided over Europe.

Even the Conservatives' sole success in the elections - the re-election of Johnson as London mayor - poses a problem for Cameron as his former schoolmate has been mooted as a potential leadership challenge.

Cameron also faces potential embarrassment on Friday when his friend Rebekah Brooks gives evidence to a public inquiry into the phone-hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch's News of the World newspaper.

British media reported that Brooks, the former head of Murdoch's British newspaper wing News International, regularly exchanged text messages with Cameron which could be called as evidence by the inquiry.