It is almost exactly 10 years since British Prime Minister David Cameron first dodged a question about whether he had taken drugs at university. It was at the Conservative Party conference in Blackpool, and he would only say that he did things as a student “that I don’t think I should talk about now I am a politician”.

It raised a laugh in the hall, but to his enemies this seemed to be a giant clue: that this seemingly decent, amiable chap had a terrible deed lurking in his past which, if uncovered, could well destroy him. So the great hunt began. The prime minister has been bemused at all of this, but not greatly worried.

This changed two years ago when Lord Ashcroft, his wealthiest enemy, hired Isabel Oakeshott, an award-winning political journalist, to trawl his past and write a biography. We’re now on day five of the revelations. We have heard about his hosting parties where drugs were in “open circulation”, his being born with “two silver spoons” in his mouth and an implausible ritual involving a dead pig.

So today, Cameron now stands exposed — as precisely the sort of person that people have thought he was for the past 10 years. It may well be that Lord Ashcroft has written an authoritative, in-depth and illuminating biography of the prime minister. But the extracts released so far look like a best man’s speech without the jokes (or photographic evidence). There is no smoking gun; there isn’t even much smoking.

To hear about an 11-year-old Cameron sipping champagne on Concorde for a friend’s birthday party is entertaining, not abhorrent (or new). It fits perfectly with what the public suspect goes on at schools such as Eton. Very rich chap enjoys gilded childhood and attends lavish parties: who’d have thought it? But the subsequent success of such people does enrage a certain type of class warrior. Former prime minister Gordon Brown, for example, was obsessed with what he saw as the Brideshead-style decadence of Cameron and Osborne’s youth.

He tried to deploy class war attacks on both, but this backfired — and for a simple reason. Voters didn’t share his bigotry. Hating people because of their background, whether poor or posh, is just not the British way — and never has been. You play the hand you’re dealt in life. If Britain was seriously outraged about Old Etonians in positions of power, Cameron would not have been returned to No 10 with an overall majority. In claiming he was cruelly denied a government job, Lord Ashcroft invites the reader to see his book as an act of revenge. But it’s not a very effective one. Indeed, stripping away his spin, the prime minister emerges from this rather well. Who can now question his judgement that Lord Ashcroft was not, on balance, the sort of person he’d want in the government?

He comes across as being rather more boring than his outlandish friends, and not a political obsessive. The sort of chap who prefers Star Wars to Hansard. All of this chimes precisely with Cameron’s public image — except it’s not an image. For better or worse, the prime minister is exactly how he appears. The more interesting (and damaging) disclosures come in another recently published book about him, Cameron at 10, by Anthony Seldon and Peter Snowdon. They paint a picture of the same man: relaxed, uxorious, unideological, utterly loyal to his inner circle.

Political weakness

All of these are precisely the qualities you want in a friend, but not always the qualities you need in a prime minister. And it’s the personal strengths that translate into political weakness. Great thought went into his meetings with US President Barack Obama: the gifts, the overall choreography, the serving of beefburgers for servicemen in the Downing St garden. But when it came to the reform of the National Health Service, no one in No 10 seems to have bothered to give it any serious consideration until the Bill had been published.

Even in matters of national security, the goings-on read like a cross between The West Wing and Laurel & Hardy. “I’m sorry, William,” Hague is told by Cameron just after losing the Syria vote, “I’ve got us into a real pickle this time.” It was the first time in two centuries that a prime minister lost a vote on war and peace — through a basic failure to prepare.

Overall, Cameron at 10 is sympathetic to its subject — but the subtitle may as well have been “Carry On Governing”. Before ordering the bombing of Libya, the prime minister convenes his National Security Council and asks if there is anyone around the table who does not think that this action is “in the British national interest”. It falls to John Sawers, the head of MI6, to explain that it’s a humanitarian mission to save rebels in Benghazi, rather than a matter of national interest. Cameron caves immediately. “Yes, yes,” he replies. “But it’s important that we do these things.”

And on this basis, a power vacuum in Libya was created — with tragic results that are still unfolding. This is what should worry us: not teenage parties but lack of attention to detail and the squandering of potential. But while the prime minister’s relaxed governing style has yielded plenty of tragicomedy, it also has its successes: he hired brilliant people and let them be. This led to Michael Gove’s school reforms; Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms; the fall in crime; the fall in taxes and consequent economic growth. The single most extraordinary fact about the last five years is that the British economy created more jobs than the rest of Europe put together. Cameron failed, abysmally, to claim proper credit for this — but his detractors have to ask: was all this a coincidence? I have my own anecdote to add to those accumulating in the bookshops. A few years ago, Cameron asked a historian which prime ministers had left No 10 on their own terms, rather than being forced out by their enemies, or by ill health. The list was pretty thin. “I want to be one of them,” he said. Most prime ministers crave crucifixion, a cause to be martyred to. He just wants to escape with his sanity intact. It makes him unusual, but while Cameron certainly has his flaws he is no villain. Lord Ashcroft has just wasted a lot of time and money trying to prove otherwise.

—The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2015