The things we thought Cameron thought — does he really think them after all?

Am I the only person who hears David Cameron say ‘Burglars leave their human rights at the door’ and thinks immediately of Pulp Fiction? Am I the only person who imagines Cameron and, say, George Osborne as two American hick security guards who capture burglars and punish them in a sort of Tarantino-esque manner I couldn’t possibly describe in The Spectator but which does, and not in a good way, involve oranges? And am I the only person who can imagine Cameron saying ‘Fetch the gimp’ and Osborne saying ‘The gimp’s asleep’ and Cameron saying ‘So wake him up then’, and then a figure being led out, clad toe to tight, smooth head in black rubber, but with a glint in its eye and a snarl around its zippered mouth that leaves you in no doubt that it must actually be William Hague?

Okay, so I probably am the only person to be thinking all that. Except for Liddle, maybe. Either way, I suppose it’s always a mistake to ask people if they’re thinking what you are thinking. Because if they aren’t, they’re probably thinking you are nuts.

In 2005, it seemed fair to assume that David Cameron was thinking what Michael Howard was thinking. I don’t remember it ever being quite established exactly what Michael Howard was thinking, but Cameron was his head of policy co-ordination at the time, so if they weren’t thinking at least roughly the same sort of thing, policy can’t really have been all that co-ordinated. Six months later, though, he was running for the leadership of the party, and had embarked upon a long campaign to convince people that, whatever it was that he had been thinking (and, it turned out, the electorate hadn’t been thinking), he didn’t think it any more.