Cameron looks to his early leadership period for inspiration

David Cameron’s big parenting push this week is a reminder of what the Prime Minister would have liked to have been before the economic crisis intervened. Cameron believes that encouraging stable, loving families is the best way to prevent social failure. Doing that reduces the demand for government and, so the logic goes, shrinking the state then becomes a lot easier.
 
How the government can try and help people be better parents without falling into the nanny state is undoubtedly tricky. But Cameron’s emphasis so far has, rightly, been on simply giving people more information to help them make their own decisions. Part of this approach is a series of new NHS videos that will be unveiled this week that offer parents practical advice on everything to do with raising children from conception onwards. 
 
In Number 10, there’s also a hope that having Cameron sitting on daytime TV sofas explaining how he wants to try and ease the pressures on modern family life will remind voters of why they warmed to him in the first place.