Cameron’s big idea is simple: he doesn’t need one

The Tories have opened the new year in a blaze of speeches and promises. But what does it all add up to? Nothing, says James Forsyth — and that’s deliberate. There will never be such a thing as Cameronism

Once more, search parties are being sent out to look for David Cameron’s big idea. They will return empty-handed. For the truth is that there is no big idea. However much social responsibility, the post-bureaucratic age or progressive conservatism might be talked up as the ‘big idea’, they are not it. Rather, they are a set of classic conservative insights updated for the 21st century. Cameron is not an ideologue but rather that very English, very Tory thing: a principled pragmatist.

‘It is impossible to understand David by applying any ideological spectrum test,’ warns one member of the shadow Cabinet. This is not meant in a derisory way. It is just that Cameron is not a politician who worries about ideological purity. As he wrote soon after becoming Tory leader, ‘I don’t believe in “isms”. Words like communism, socialism, capitalism and republicanism all conjure up one image in my mind: extremism.’

What David Cameron really believes is a question that intrigues even his oldest political friends. A while back, I was having a drink with two of them: one close enough to have been to his stag party, the other to play a key role in his selection as the candidate for Witney. We began to talk about what really motivated the man who is likely to be prime minister by the summer. Was it anything more than reaching the top of the cursus honorum? Both leant back in thought. Then one piped up: marriage and the family and education.

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In fact, one said, Cameron believed so strongly in marriage that he had even berated his friend and strategy guru Steve Hilton for not getting married — and delivered this dressing down in front of a roomful of people at work.