Cameron’s great secret: he’s not a very good politician

This was a vital election. A Tory failure would have been an act of political treason. Five years ago, the UK was grovelling with the PIGS in the fiscal sty. Our public finances were in a deplorable state, the financial system was in crisis and growth had disappeared over the economic horizon. No one has paid enough tribute to Messrs Cameron and Osborne for the sang-froid they displayed in the face of such adversity, and for their success.

Not only that: we have two long-term structural problems in this country, both of which Lady Thatcher sidestepped, both of which David Cameron tackled. The first is welfare. In its corrosion of morale, its sabotage of élan vital, our welfare system creates an underclass. Any travel-stained kid with two legs, two arms, semi-competent English, an honest face and a willing manner can walk off a bus from Warsaw and into a job. So why do we have 1.8 million unemployed?

There is one obvious reason. To use Alastair Campbell’s contemptibly complacent phrase, we have bog-standard comprehensives, which turn out children only equipped to live on welfare. There again, the Tories acted, with the Gove reforms.

The radical changes in welfare — IDS’s agenda — and education are not just legislative. Within another five years, they will have changed the culture, in the same way that Margaret Thatcher’s trade union reforms did, and will be irreversible. That would not have been true if Mr Cameron had lost this election, which he came perilously close to doing — and it would have been his own fault.

There is one profound misconception about David Cameron. He began his career in that great political nursery, the Conservative Research Department. He then became a political adviser, and afterwards was alleged to have worked as a spin-doctor for Michael Green, though his role was broader.