In order to flesh out this framework, the Prime Minister should consider how he and his colleagues talk about the following six fields: democracy, liberty, security, opportunity, family and history. Each one implies a host of moral imperatives which, taken together, should impart strength and resolve to the government. Michael Gove and Theresa May, the odd couple responsible for liberty and security, belong to the school of moral realism — for instance, the radical evil embodied in Islamist terror. Neither is given to empty moralising.

But it is crucial not to adopt a rhetorical tone that excludes the unobtrusive majority of the British people. Henry Thoreau claimed that “most men lead lives of quiet desperation”, but George Eliot, whose life exemplifies for Brooks the redemptive power of love, was more optimistic. She ended her greatest novel, Middlemarch, with a plea on behalf of “those who live faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs”. Elsewhere in that novel she warned against being carried away by ideology: “There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by a deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.” The new Cameron government should make a point of asking itself, before each new policy or initiative, how George Eliot’s “painstaking, honest men” (and women) “whose lives have no discernible echo beyond the neighbourhood where they dwelt” will react to its underlying moral purpose.

If this nation is indeed as good at accepting its predicament with good humour and compassion as he thinks it is, Mr Cameron ought to have no difficulty in connecting with it, as long as he bears in mind the idea that for most people the political world that he inhabits is not the real one. Ed Miliband collided with this fact when the voters of Yorkshire eviscerated him live on Question Time. They saw that he had not grasped the consequences for their lives that would have followed from his insistence that he knew better than they did what was good for them.

Politics can only be made real to non-politicians when it is cast in moral terms, and even then they may well reject what is being offered. The Prime Minister is less inclined to make the same mistake, but he still seems aloof to many people because he tends to treat them as though they were all like him: driven by ambition, fame and success. Most lives, by these standards, are failures; but these standards are not the only ones that matter. Most of us are content to lead lives of modest accomplishments, doing our best by our own lights. The government’s job is mainly to get out of the way except when it is really needed, and even then to step gingerly: enabling rather than manipulating, in the background rather than the foreground, liberating talents rather than supplanting them.

The new government promises to champion “working people” by promoting free enterprise, to support the family by protecting marriage, childcare and inheritance, to shift money from welfare benefits to apprenticeships. A new, more muscular conservatism represented by the likes of Sajid Javid and Robert Halfon is meant to persuade a still sceptical public that Mr Cameron means business this time. The prospect of White Van Dave, leader of the Workers’ Party, is still faintly preposterous.

However, the Prime Minister has yet to convince many of his own party that he has real character. Lord Finkelstein, one of his most loyal lieutenants, would agree with much of what I have said here, but draws the mistaken conclusion that the silent majority — the so-called “shy Tories” — has now endorsed the whole Cameron project of “modernisation”. That is not necessarily the case — many people voted Conservative in spite, not because, of the Coalition’s social liberalism or its environmentalism. But even if it were true that Mr Cameron’s Whiggish views had struck a chord, he would be wise not to advertise the fact. If David Brooks is right, the road to character requires humility. At all costs, the Prime Minister must try not to look smug.