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.

Four months later, the credit crunch caused a run on Northern Rock. Economics again dominated the political debate. Britain went into recession and its deficit and levels of debt ballooned. This necessitated a change in the Cameroon strategy. Questions about tax and spending could not be dealt with by a simple commitment to ‘share the proceeds of growth’.  The Conservative party came, once again, to be defined in terms of economic choice.

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The other part of the modernisation strategy was to downplay Europe as an issue. In his first party conference speech as leader, Cameron lamented that the Conservatives had left the centre ground. ‘Instead of talking about the things that most people care about, we talked about what we cared about most. While parents worried about childcare, getting the kids to school, balancing work and family life — we were banging on about Europe.