He had not spoken in such coherent and promising terms since the autumn of 2007, when his response to the tragic shooting of 11-year-old Rhys Jones in Liverpool was the formulation of his Broken Britain meme. For a few weeks — with Gordon Brown threatening to hold an early election he ended up ducking — the Tory leader became a much more fleshed-out figure, more serious, more conservative and authentic. 

And then, as so often happens with Cameron, the caravan moved on and he lost focus.

Those impulses eventually surfaced again in the ill-fated "Big Society", a campaign which has rightly been much ridiculed. The project had genuinely conservative roots — a desire to shrink the statist behemoth and encourage non-state actors to take greater responsibility via volunteering and civic engagement — but it was all hopelessly vague.

Indeed, it is often said by Cameron's critics that he is merely a marketing man who believes in nothing. It is more accurate to say that he is poor at marketing his better (and more conservative) ideas.

A complicating factor is the relationship with Osborne. The pair are extremely close, which is unusual when it comes to prime ministers and chancellors. But Osborne's default position is caution and the pursuit of short-term tactical advantage dressed up as long-term strategic thinking, a tendency he encourages in Cameron.

A common mistake made by commentators is to presume that the key Cameroons share precisely the same world view. Osborne is much more liberal — in the social, rather than economic sense — than Cameron, creating a little-discussed policy divide that the Chancellor absolutely hates any attention being drawn to.

Cameron has long advocated the tax system being recalibrated to support the family. Under the cover of the excuse that the Lib Dems would never allow it, the Chancellor resists such traditional conservative thinking.

Steve Hilton — Cameron's close friend and guru — certainly views the world very differently from Osborne. He was at root a restless reformer before the coalition, being most interested in social breakdown and the kind of welfare and education reforms aimed at tackling it. But he has been properly radicalised by contact with what he sees as a complacent civil service machine, growing increasingly Eurosceptic (to the point where he advocates potential withdrawal from the EU) and arguing loudly in Number 10 for more supply-side reform to encourage economic growth.

Cameron, who has a deep distaste for conflict among his subordinates, tries to manage these tensions by seeking compromise and then privately occasionally losing his temper (as he did in Number 10 at the height of the hacking imbroglio). 

As we have seen, none of it is a recipe for consistent leadership of the kind that Britain's current position desperately requires. And it seems an inadequate response when the social and economic challenges, involving the relative decline of the West, are so immense.