Why does it take a crisis to sting Cameron into action?

James Forsyth reviews the week in politics

The bar of the Brighton Metropole hotel was packed on Saturday night, with the sort of people locals would want to avoid. It was the Tory spring conference, and the journalists and aides were drawn to the bar not only by the prospect of doing a whole conference’s worth of drinking in one night but by news of a ‘seismic’ poll in the Sunday Times. If there was going to be conference drama, no one wanted to miss it. When midnight passed with no news, anticipation heightened. In the early hours of the morning, the news arrived: the YouGov poll pointed to a Labour victory.

Until that poll was published, ‘Five more years of Gordon Brown’ had been little more than a Tory slogan; no one could quite believe that the electorate would inflict that on themselves. But after 2 a.m. on Sunday morning, it looked a real and frightening prospect.