Cameron has diagnosed the problem, now he must prescribe the cure

Until I read Andrew Sparrow’s story in The Guardian today, I’d missed this quote from David Cameron on Andrew Marr:

“You know they’ve given power to the judges, on the one hand, and Europe on the other and the whole thing, frankly, is not in my control. That’s what people, I think, are angry about. They want more control over their politics and their politicians.”

I think this is an absolutely crucial point. People’s anger about expenses has been so great not just because MPs were playing the system and diddling the public purse but because people don’t think MPs do anything anymore. As one Tory said to me on Friday in light of the news that Baby’s P mother could be out in three years, ‘that’s why they [the public] hate politicians’.

Now that Cameron has shown that he gets that this is the problem, he needs an agenda to deal with it. That is going to have to involve overriding Dominic Grieve on the ECHR, bringing back powers from Brussels and replacing decision by quangocrats with ones made by elected and locally accountable politicians. We’ll find out in the next few months, whether Cameron has the stomach for these fights