Over the past year Cameron has emerged as a leader of real ability with a talent for luck. Libya aside, it can't get much better
If I were David Cameron I would stop now. It cannot get much better. The polls are up. The Telegraph and the Mail love him. He seems immune to bad news on the economy. At the end of his first year of office he has emerged as an adept political operator with a talent for luck. For all the dud trees in his coalition – two more sprouted this week on police and universities – the overall wood remains intact. How come?
Minority governments, which is what Britain really has now, are normally a disaster. They are timid and obsessed with Commons arithmetic, watching to see whether and how they can survive another day. In May of last year, Cameron produced a masterful locking device, not so much a coalition as a political detention centre for Liberal Democrats. He needed them badly, but never showed it. Without them he might have stumbled on for a few months and called another election, like Harold Wilson in 1974 – but given the economic emergency that would have been reckless. Instead he turned the office-hungry Lib Dems into fall guys, forming them into a buffer zone against Labour and a bulwark against his own rightwing. The marvel of Ken Clarke at the justice department would be inconceivable without the coalition.
The current difficulties of the Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg were predictable, inevitable but unimportant. From the moment in 2010 that parliament was "hung", he had few options and soon had none. He has not put a foot wrong, but footwork is immaterial when you are wearing concrete shoes. Lib Dems have always thought a hung parliament would be their day of glory, which shows what fools they are. They get one day of glory and a parliament of slavery. Cameron's deal with Clegg was like an ayatollah promising his warriors a thousand virgins when they die.
That said, Cameron could not have taken any of this for granted. A suicide instinct runs through centrist politics, and he had to offer Clegg and his colleagues not just jobs but a meaningless five-year security contract and "policy concessions" more apparent than real. The one on alternative voting blew up in their faces last week. Coalition governments remain accountable not to the electorate but to the Commons. Cameron has to guard his majority there, and that is by no means assured. That it has lasted a year is impressive. That it should last more than two is not impossible, but remains unlikely.
Cameron's leadership style is beloved of cartoonists. While the Little Lord Fauntleroy caricature is a little tired, that of the smooth, tail-coated toff has more bite. The British have never minded the ruling class doing what it says on the packet, provided some deference is shown to the bourgeoisie. Cameron has been adept at that. Public school charm, even with a touch of caddishness, as deployed by Cameron and Tony Blair, may be scorned by the Westminster club, with its distaste for charisma and celebrity. But when combined with humour and a self-deprecating confidence, it can carry a leader over the bumps and potholes of politics, where such men as John Major and Gordon Brown stumble and fall.
In Cameron's case these qualities are combined with a close-knit team of old friends with whom he has an instinctive working relationship. When the heart of British government falls back on formal structure it cracks and warps, as it did under Blair and Brown and at the end of the Thatcher era. While Cameron has been tough with such errant ministers as Caroline Spelman, Andrew Lansley and David Willetts, his loyalty to his inner circle is fierce. It is hard to imagine a catastrophe that could part him from his chancellor, George Osborne.
Nor is that all. When the new cabinet had every excuse to do little but wrestle with the economy and hang on, Cameron behaved like a prime minister with a full majority and a full agenda. The range and depth of his programme has been breathtaking, beyond that of Clement Attlee, Thatcher or Blair in their first years, and comparable only with Asquith and Lloyd George in 1906. Financial emergency has been used not to avoid public sector reform but to cloak it. Every corner of the welfare state has been slated for an overdue spring clean: pensions, disability benefit, family allowance, social housing tenure, unemployment relief, national insurance – even the "sword in the stone" of welfare reform, single benefit payment.
On other fronts, the record is more chequered but no less dynamic. Reforms are in train to university finance, health service procurement, defence equipment, local planning, divorce mediation, adoption, asbos, young offenders, prison numbers, criminal records and overseas aid. While much is promised and little as yet delivered, the coalition has begun a slaughterhouse of sacred cows that have been meandering across the public sector munching gold for half a century. For Cameron to have attacked them head-on, and in the first term of a minority government, is to his credit.
His mistakes have been mostly those of inexperience. Like Blair, Cameron was never a minister, nor held any high executive office, before arriving in Downing Street. Like Blair, he is still too ready to regard the press as his mirror of accountability, and thus he accorded too much influence to his initial spin doctor, Andy Coulson. More alarming is Cameron's mimicry of Blair in seeking relief from domestic pressure in pointless overseas travel. This appears to have led him to the easy machismo of a foreign war, against Libya, for reasons that remain inexplicable.
It is possible that, with Cameron's luck, one of the costly bombs being dropped nightly on Tripoli might kill Gaddafi. But what this has to do with Britain's current problems is a mystery. Foreign policy not only occupies slews of unproductive time, it seduces a prime minister into thinking that anything that yields a red carpet must be important. A hundred Libyan bombs will not save Cameron from taking his eye off the NHS ball.
The likelihood must be that at some point in the next two years Lib Dem discipline will crack and an anti-coalition (and pro-suicide) faction emerge. The leftwing dream of a "progressive Lib-Lab majority" has dazzled commentators for half a century, but that will not stop some Lib Dems hoping to test a post-election, Miliband-led coalition for size. Indeed, perhaps Cameron's one tactical error was the five-year pledge to Clegg, since a snap general election could not only beat Labour but obliterate the Lib Dems for years to come. As it is, some rough and ready "coupon" arrangement is already lurking in Tory minds. Would they really run a candidate against Clegg in Sheffield or Vince Cable in Twickenham?
The past year has seen Cameron emerge as a political leader of real ability. He won last week's voting referendum with panache, releasing his attack dogs on the enemy while shrugging off Lib Dem cries of foul. He has sustained the "emergency coalition" aura of his government with greater finesse than did Lloyd George in 1916 or Ramsay MacDonald in 1931. He has yet to experience a serious political crisis or, with the exception of Libya, risk a possibly fatal trap. The cartoons are right. The head of school has a right to be cocky.