David Cameron

Does he have what it takes?

The Conservative leader, David Cameron, is still the favourite to be Britain’s next prime minister

HE HAS led the Conservative Party for more than four years and is the man most likely to lead Britain after the general election this spring. Yet people still wonder just who David Cameron is. This is not because he hides what he does or fudges what he thinks, as those on the receiving end of countless webcameron flashes and unending policy e-mails can attest. It is, rather, that his views are not always those of either his party or, perhaps, of his age.

The Economist talked to Mr Cameron on March 29th, in the last of a series of on-the-record interviews with the leaders of the three main political parties. Though only 15 years younger than Gordon Brown, prime minister and leader of the Labour Party, he seems of a different generation, with an easy, human touch that Mr Brown often struggles to achieve. He has more obviously in common with the similarly 40-ish, six-foot-tall leader of the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg. But Mr Cameron is an altogether slicker number, and a far more experienced political operator.

Those looking for the Big Idea from Mr Cameron will be disappointed. He has a very English scepticism about grand theories. His identity lies somewhere between liberal London, where he has spent his adult life, and the conservative Home Counties, where he grew up. Ironically for a man whose Euroscepticism has irked Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, he may at heart be what continental Europeans would recognise as a Christian Democrat. He espouses a social conservatism that dwells on broad issues, such as the cultural causes of poverty, not on the narrow lifestyle questions such as gay rights (on which he is anyway tolerant) that obsess some on the American right. He is an Atlanticist, though not a passionate one, and a gentle free-marketeer.

He does, however, have a distinctive analysis of his own country. British society, so his critique goes, is broken. The cause is the erosion of responsibility (his favourite word) by a hyperactive state. He is at his most animated when justifying his (arguably overstated) social pessimism, pointing to “our records against the rest of Europe on things like teenage pregnancy and drug abuse, alcohol, family worklessness, educational problems”. The analysis is open to criticism: the societies he sees as unbroken, including many in continental Europe, spend more on welfare than he would want to or can afford to.

The cure, he says, is giving power away, strengthening local government and empowering people directly by, for example, letting them set up their own schools. He is undogmatic about the precise size of the state, deploring instead its over-centralisation; he prefers a big society to a big state. It remains to be seen whether that will bring relief to the overburdened public finances.

As the election nears, the Labour government is seeking to make much of its own (not unblemished) experience in economic management, tarring the Tory opposition as obstructive novices. George Osborne, the shadow chancellor of the exchequer, is a favourite target. Mr Cameron sticks up for Mr Osborne’s performance during the financial crisis, inviting opponents to “push as hard as [they] can”. The Tories supported the bank bail-out in 2008, he notes. Their opposition to the fiscal stimulus may have been attacked by some economists, but others agree that it “added £12.5 billion ($18.9 billion) to our debt without making a noticeable difference to the economy”.

In a contest that he insists is a choice between the two main parties rather than a referendum on his alone, he has been clearer for longer about the fiscal squeeze required than Mr Brown. “Give me the equivalent of our asking people to retire a year later from 2016,” he says; at the party conference in October Mr Osborne was commendably ahead of the pack in outlining some specific measures to reduce the fiscal deficit. And Labour has been forced to face reality as a result. “You don’t hear investment versus cuts any more,” Mr Cameron says, referring to Labour’s favourite dividing line in elections past.

Nor, as the polls narrow, do you hear much detail these days about Tory plans to get a fiscal grip. Mr Osborne’s pledge partly to reverse the government’s planned increase in national-insurance (NI) contributions, announced this week, will be funded by cutting waste, a familiar theme on both sides of the aisle. This may be “doable and deliverable”, as Mr Cameron claims, but he will not say precisely how.

The sting in the Falklands tale

Mr Cameron once called himself the “heir to Blair”. Where he least resembles the former prime minister is on foreign affairs, to which he brings case-by-case policies rather than informing ideals. Mr Blair was both Britain’s most Atlanticist and most Europhile prime minister; Mr Cameron is likely to be less of either.

Is there a special relationship with America? Yes, he says: “On any number of issues you see Britain and America working closer than with other allies.” But he points out that “you have to remember we are the junior partner. I think part of getting the relationship right is understanding how best to play the role.”

He is “happier than [he] was” with the way the war in Afghanistan is being fought, but “we are still in the situation where British troops are in charge of two-thirds of the population [in Helmand] but there are only 10,000 of us and 20,000 Americans.” There is muted praise for Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president: “At his best, he can do good things.”

What Mr Cameron is not happy with is America’s recent implication that Britain should negotiate with Argentina over the Falkland Islands. “I’ve always said the special relationship should be a frank and a candid one, and I think you should frankly and candidly say we’re disappointed.”

His view of Europe, too, is more nuanced than some might expect. He has been (rightly) criticised for pulling his party out of the centre-right grouping in the European Parliament to which the parties of Mrs Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, belong, and for cultivating the Euroscepticism of his party faithful. But he is a broadly restraining influence on it and, with so much to do at home, he will hardly relish fights with Brussels. “I think people in Europe will be pleasantly surprised that we will be activist and engaged from day one,” he says. “But we have a very clear view about the direction we ought to go in.” He wants to win op-outs from the European Union’s social chapter and charter of fundamental rights. Few fancy his chances.

And what of his chances in the general election expected next month? The 17-point poll leads the Tories enjoyed last year have faded to margins less than half that size. The decline in the Tories’ popularity in recent months continues to puzzle, with some putting it down to a message that is too bleakly austere and others blaming it on something close to the opposite: a lack of Thatcherite punch and clarity.

In fact it probably owes more to the recent economic recovery, which seems strong enough to vindicate the government’s handling of the recession but not so strong that a change of management can be risked safely. Labour’s poll rating has increased by more than the Conservatives’ has fallen. And the crisis has challenged the opposition as well as the government. After rebranding themselves as a party that could see beyond the market to social and environmental concerns, the Tories have had to re-rebrand themselves as sober stewards of a ruined economy. “I don’t feel too shocked by the tightening of the polls becauseI’ve always believed it’s a very big mountain we have to climb,” says Mr Cameron.

The anti-politics mood unleashed by last year’s parliamentary-expenses scandal also makes it hard for any politician, however appealing, to electrify the public. The country’s propensity to fall for a leader the way it did in 1997 is no longer there. Being preferred to your opponents—which the Tories still are in every poll—may be the best any politician can aim for. “Labour would like nothing more than just to talk about the Conservatives and run away from their record,” says Mr Cameron. “We’re not going to let them do that.”