It’s now clear: David Cameron was never a real moderniser

I have a friend who was a Young Conservative. Just the one, I promise, and he’s grown out of it by now. I remember him, though, back from a party conference, freshly despairing, some time in the bleak, dandruffy Tory doldrums of 2000-ish. ‘It would be very easy,’ I remember him wailing, ‘for them to have some funky lights and Morcheeba playing in the background. Couldn’t they at least do that?’

Easy or not, it would be another five years and two bald leaders before they’d do anything of the sort. By then it would be the Killers, rather than Morcheeba, but the idea was much the same. It’s easy to forget, these days, but the David Cameron we have now — austerity Cameron; he of the tiny, stern lizard mouth — is a very different sort of Cameron from the one who won the leader-ship in those booming, Blairish days ten years ago.