Politics: Cameron is at his best when he is boldest

David Cameron must sometimes wonder if the gods are against his modernising project. Events have forced him back on to the traditional Tory territory of Europe and the economy.

This is not how the Cameroons expected it to be in the early days of his leadership. Then he defined himself not by his position on spending cuts or the repatriation of powers but by his urging the country to ‘Vote Blue, Go Green’ while wearing a pair of recycled trainers. He was a different kind of Tory talking about a whole new set of issues.

In May 2007, Oliver Letwin, the modernisers’ intellectual godfather, gave a speech setting out the theory behind Cameron Conservatism. He declared that they wanted to bring about two important shifts in politics. The first was to move ‘the locus of debate from an econocentric paradigm to a sociocentric paradigm’. Straight after Letwin had spoken, one influential Tory told me that they planned to fight the next election on Britain’s social recession.