Cameron is not an enigma, he’s an Anglican

The reason why so many people cannot fathom David Cameron is that he is an Anglican. This gives him considerable (some would say contemptible) flexibility as far as dogma is concerned, while making him intent on upholding a strict (if unstated) code of behaviour.

No wonder the Tory leader infuriates those in his own party who crave certainty. The hungry sheep look up and are not fed. Theirs is the predicament of Nigerian Christians who look to Canterbury for dogma, and find themselves fobbed off with liberalism.

Robin Harris, who as director of the Conservative Research Department was Cameron’s first employer at Westminster, gave memorable expression to the sense of betrayal felt by such Tories when he said of the present leader: ‘I don’t think that in any shape or form he could be described as a Conservative in philosophical terms. He has no principled sense of direction: his only sense of direction is upwards.’

Critics who demand intellectual consistency are unlikely ever to be satisfied by Cameron, one of whose merits is his refusal to confine himself in an ideological straitjacket, especially an out-of-date one. Christopher Caldwell recently defined in the New York Times the dilemma facing the three Tory leaders before Cameron: ‘They could not embrace Thatcherism, because it lost elections for them, but they could not discard it, because it was their intellectual lodestar.’

Cameron escapes this problem by not being an intellectual. This does not mean he is stupid: he is astonishingly quick on the uptake; but it means he can leave to anxious members of his staff the thankless task of discerning the coherence of his ideas. Nor would those staff get any thanks if they tried to discharge that task by telling inquirers that their boss is an Anglican: such an answer would produce a mixture of scorn and incomprehension, and would be taken as confirmation of Dave’s essential vacuousness.