Politics: Is Britain ready for an optimistic Prime Minister?

David Cameron is a sunny-side-up politician. At his first party conference as leader, he declared, ‘Let optimism beat pessimism. Let sunshine win the day.’ This attitude infused his approach to policy as well as politics. His economic doctrine was all about ‘sharing the proceeds of growth’. George Osborne, Cameron’s chief strategist, liked to stress that it was imperative that the Conservatives didn’t ‘sound like the old man on the park bench who says things were better in 1985, or 1955, or 1855. We have got to be the party that embraces the future.’

Then came the financial crisis. With banks collapsing, sunny rhetoric would have been horribly out of place. Cameron had to change both his course and his tone. And he managed it reasonably well: the open-necked look was replaced by sober-­coloured ties and the ‘proceeds of growth’ by ‘the age of austerity’. In the process, though, much of what made him a new kind of Conservative was lost.