Cameron can't risk becoming the status quo candidate

The next few weeks should be a good time to be Prime Minister. Unusually for this decade, anti-politics will not be the mood of the moment. Instead, the nation will indulge in an Olympic holiday from austerity. Every time the Prime Minister congratulates a British medal winner, his words will be eagerly reported. He will also be on hand whenever a foreign businessman announces a new investment in Britain.

Cameron knows that looking like he is trying to gain partisan advantage from the Games would be disastrous. So he’s quick to stress that the public won’t confuse Olympic success with economic growth, something which remains alarmingly elusive. The economy shrank a further 0.7 per cent last quarter, meaning that we have had nine months of negative growth. But, in private, the Cameron circle knows that the Games should reinforce his standing as a plausible Prime Minister.

But in this age of discontent, even the Olympics aren’t without risks. In No. 10, they are increasingly worried about the Zil lanes that are meant to speed VIPs to the Games. They know that the sight of various bigwigs zooming past a gridlocked populace could all too easily become a metaphor for modern-day society where the only people who appear to be getting ahead are the elite.

Cameron is so concerned about this that he has, to the irritation of some colleagues, said that he’ll be using public transport to get to the Games and that he expects ministers to do the same where security permits. But, in the long term, the biggest risk for Cameron isn’t the Zil lanes but inadvertently becoming the defender of the failing economic status quo.