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. By the time of the first election debate, he sounded uncomfortably like the old man on the park bench.

Even after making it to Downing Street, Cameron has remained wary of sunshine politics. He has prioritised reassurance about the economy over the ‘vision thing’. The furrowed brow has remained his favoured public expression. But some of those around the Prime Minister now argue that 2012 calls for the return of the more upbeat Cameron — that the opportunities afforded by the Diamond Jubilee and the Olympics must not be missed. How to balance this optimism with economic realism is what No. 10 is currently trying to work out.