Obviously, what with him waking up every morning in a flat in Downing Street, and then walking downstairs to work to be greeted by senior civil servants, and then being called Prime Minister all day, David Cameron knows what his job title is.
He is also good at many of the basics of the job. He is comfortable in his own skin and he retains a healthy sense of humour about the foibles of other powerful people. He notes media criticism but he doesn’t torture himself as both Sir John Major or Gordon Brown did. He never looks embarrassing disembarking from a plane on a visit abroad. As I noted years ago when other people laughed and said he would never be Prime Minister (wrong, look: he’s Prime Minister) his character is, in the ways I’ve mentioned, suited to the job.
But there is also something missing. A certain grip, or determination to occupy every inch of the job, is absent.
Sue Cameron brilliantly deconstructed the weaknesses in the Number 10 machine in today’s Telegraph. There is a drift that can only be the fault of the PM.
It is as though the Prime Minister is there, wearing the suit, hosting the meetings, doing PMQs, shaking hands, being perfectly presentable and fluent, but hardly ever transcending the day to day grind.
When he does “bang the table” to get his own way it is often about the wrong thing, such as the now counter-productive health bill or the lunatic plan to spend £32 billion making it half an hour quicker to get from Birmingham to London. Elsewhere, on important subjects, he frequently just leaves the field of play.
The most appalling recent example has been the fuss over the appointment of Professor Les Ebdon (University of Luton) to be access commissar with a long-term licence to beat up our leading academic institutions. I won’t rehearse the arguments here. Ebdon should simply not have been appointed and Cameron should have pulled rank over Vice Cable.
Perhaps Cameron has lived too long with the compromises of coalition, and is inhibited by now always being able to see things from Nick Clegg’s point of view. On the two occassions when he was clear-sighted enough to say “stuff that” (on AV and then with his veto on Brussels) he has seemed like a much bigger figure and his party has benefited.
Imagine if he had said, firmly but politely: “I’m the Prime Minister. Professor Ebdon will not be appointed, end of story.” What would have happened? Cable would have strutted around to no good effect and sounded silly giving endless interviews explaining why it is a splendid idea to dumb-down the best universities. Might he have resigned? I doubt it, but so what if he had? What a pathetic end to a career: resigning over Professor Les Ebdon.
Cameron seems not to have grasped how to wield Prime Ministerial power properly.
Living in New York, I confess I don’t know the precise nature of Professor Les Dawson’s remit. If it is to bring increased rigour to our universities, abolish stupid subjects, raise standards and – along the way – puncture the pomposity of Oxbridge, then that sounds good to me. But if it is simply to “gurn” at the smarter institutions and gossip over the back fence while saying nothing in particular (surely the true genius of Mr Dawson), then you’re right – the PM should have hoofed him out of the picture.
I agree that Cameron knows how to act prime ministerial, and I think his heart, as well as his head, is in the right place (i.e. not up his arse). But it would certainly be refreshing if he and his gang actually DID something remarkable, instead of just keeping the ship on course and avoiding the rocks. It would be nice, for a start, to know where we’re headed.
At this rate, should David Cameron even continue in this role? The Liberal Democrat tail seems forever to be wagging the Coalition dog.
Cameron’s performance is deeply depressing. Reading Sue Cameron’s piece makes the blood boil; if No. 10′s reaction to Lansley’s ill conceived bill was as described (‘We’re f**ked’) then it’s almost impossible to understand why no steps were taken to halt it before it turned into the train wreck it has become.
Equally depressing is the lack of ‘men in grey suits’ within the Tory party to confront Cameron and put him on notice to get a grip or face a challenge.
I don’t care if some aspects of Cameron’s personality are suited to the job. Without grip, he’s nothing.
Cameron is that classic One Nation Tory construct: a left-leaning patrician insulated from daily realities by wealth and social contacts who thinks that the left has all the best answers. Think Sir Ian Gilmour or Chris Patten. Such people loathed Margaret Thatcher (for reasons both of ideology and pure snobbbery) and are very much at home with the Lib Dems many of whose leadership (Clegg, Huhne, Pantsdown) are cut from the same cloth. Expecting Cameron to be a Conservative is like expecting Pope Benedict XVI to reverse Humanae Vitae….in fact the latter is more likely.