Fight or flight

David Cameron now has the chance to be the Prime Minister he always wanted to be. Up to now, his premiership has, to his frustration, been dominated by the economic crisis that the country is facing. His cherished social reform agenda has not been the government’s animating mission but a rhetorical extra. But after last week’s riots, this has all changed. Broke Britain is now being forced to share its space at the top of the national agenda with Cameron’s specialist subject, Broken Britain.

This crisis may have deprived Cameron of his summer holiday but it has given him back his political mission. Those present at the meeting in Downing Street before Cameron addressed parliament last Thursday say the mood was remarkably upbeat. There was no resentment about being dragged back from their villas to their desks; no angst or panicking about a country in chaos. Instead, there was a confidence that the Prime Minister was playing on his home turf.

To believers, it is as if David Cameron’s whole career to date has been preparation for this moment. They boast that his warnings about the broken society have been vindicated and that now is the chance for him to show that the ‘big society’ really is the answer to the problems he identified several years ago. They happily admit that Cameron feels far more at home with this subject than the deficit — now he is talking about what he really cares about, they say.
Conservative ministers feel the same way. They are struggling to keep a note of excitement out of their voices, aware that it would be unseemly to appear pleased at the political moment that the riots and their aftermath have created. They believe that they have been presented with an opportunity to move the country decisively to the right, to brush aside the obstacles that have so frustrated their reform agenda.