Let's start with a quiz. Is David Cameron a) Margaret Thatcher, but worse; b) Tony Blair, but weaker; or c) his own man, with his own plan? He has been prime minister for almost a year so we ought to know the answer. It is Cameron's fault and Cameron's big problem that while many voters would answer a), and many Tory MPs would mutter b), almost no one would say c).
As he troops around the nation stirring up disgruntlement over the alternative vote, Cameron is exposing himself as an ideological mystery. He has the command of a prime minister and heads a government of indisputable energy, but he offers too little sense of why this is happening and where it might lead. He is allowing himself to be defined by the circumstances he has ended up in cuts and coalition rather than by a purpose.
Cameron is a man with deep instincts, a series of urges and half-formed visions that he is almost entirely failing to explain. There is a sort of muffled jabbering from Downing Street, phrases that don't connect: on immigration, prisons, red tape, the NHS and university access. Even the basics bewilder his MPs, which after getting on for six years as party leader is odd. Is he, they ask, a liberal or a Tory or indeed any sort of Conservative at all? The Tory right might soon stir against this, if only there were such a thing as a unified right rather than a series of gangs with competing leaders, ideas and animosities. As it is, Tory MPs spend their time in a state of concern about their prime minister and his dottier habits while reassuring themselves that the chancellor is really in charge and setting a firm line on spending.
Improving society
While George Osborne is a liberal, of a fairly pure type, Cameron is a solid Conservative of quite a traditional kind who just happens to believe that conservative ideas are relevant to his country's future. We're not used to such things in Britain, where conservatism has mostly trailed along after social democracy, adopting its more obvious successes and daring to lead only when it comes to defending the free market. Cameron is not much interested in markets. It is society that he wants to improve. That's why my answer to the question at the start of this piece is that Cameron is neither Blair nor Thatcher but someone more distinctive than we yet understand. He doesn't regard conservatism as an ideology, but as a sensible way to interpret human nature. He wants to use the power of the state in a targeted way to promote social virtues. He thinks that the source of happiness lies in the quality of human relationships.
Recently a friend, who knows Cameron's mind intimately, urged me to read a new American book, that he promised would explain Cameron's form of conservatism better than anyone has managed until now. He's right. It does. Unfortunately, in literary terms, The Social Animal is also a terrible book. Its author is David Brooks, a New York Times columnist much respected by some of Cameron's friends.
His book is an antiseptic tale of two human blobs who meet, marry and die in a timeless rolling present, their all-American lives supposedly exemplars of what is right and wrong with society and the state. It is also driven by a powerful idea: that the way people interact matters more than anything else, and that this can be studied and changed through the agency of science. Brooks and Cameron share a strong sense of the limits to rationality. They don't think that the way people live is best measured or controlled by numbers. The right will ask where the market rigour is and the left will ask about state spending and both will have a point.
But so does Brooks, with his defence of willpower and self-improvement, in which brain science replaces religion as an explanation of how to live a good life. He drops scientific studies rather lumpily into his narrative, just as Cameron's team have come to believe that cognitive research holds the key to getting social policy right, and that brain scans matter as much as charts of distributional inequality.
The core of Cameron's thinking is a broad optimism about the possibilities of human existence. He does not think that his job is to fend off unavoidable failure by bailing people out or locking them up. His problem is that this amounts to a sort of positive miasma that no one can see, and so no one can sell. Like an image conjured up by the Gestalt effect, Cameron's philosophy amounts to a series of dots and curves. Only when the mood takes you does it appear to be a coherent whole.
