Affable Cameron invites you into his home

Perhaps I’m alone in this, but David Cameron interviews better in print than he does on screen. He’s almost too polished on television. His supreme confidence and tendency to guffaw at his scripted jokes can grate. But in print his assurance has an affable, human quality.

The Daily Mail has interviewed him today. Most of the piece is a lifestyle feature – Dave at home attending to Florence’s evening feed as he watches Newsnight. It is vacuous fare, but it strikes a brilliant contrast with Ed Miliband’s rout at the hands of the nation’s housewives on the Jeremy Vine Show, where there were echoes of Gordon Brown’s excruciating unease with the world beyond Westminster. These popular perceptions are important in politics’ grand scheme, no matter how seemingly trivial.

Elsewhere, Cameron was able to escape Florence’s pervasive tyranny and make some substantial points. He regrets sacking Lord Young, but remains convinced that he took the right decision (he was rueful on the subject of Vince Cable’s survival, saying that coalition required compromise.) Also, he distanced himself from Nick Clegg personally – part of his efforts to quell backbench disquiet about mergers and his over-amiable relationship with the Liberal Democrats.

He also made the most articulate and logically coherent defence of the tuition fee hike I’ve heard from his government.

‘I was talking to some factory workers about this today. I asked them: “Do you think it is right that your taxes are going to educate my children and your boss’s children? If you want high-quality expanding universities, which we all know we need in the age of India and China and global competition, who is going to pay for it? You’ve only got two choices: the taxpayers, some of whom are poor. Or graduates, and only if they are successful. I think we can win that ­argument. I really, really do… When you think about it, I got a free university ­education which was paid for by those much less well off than me. Where is the ­fairness in that?’

If the government is to win the argument (and therefore insulate those Lib Dems who took a brave and necessary decision), that argument will have to be reiterated.