That retreat followed Cameron's convincing victory in the AV referendum, when his intervention helped squash the Lib-Dem-dominated campaign to abandon the first-past-the-post electoral system.

 But from that victory he drew precisely the wrong conclusions. Rather than feeling emboldened and realising that his coalition partners had nowhere to go, he became obsessed with keeping them sweet — hence the concessions on NHS reforms. 

The attempts by Cameron and Osborne to copy the postmodern Blair approach, by cosying up to Rupert Murdoch and his executives and viewing the acquisition of power as a transaction, had always looked out of date. The explosion of the News of the World hacking scandal, and the arrest of Cameron's former spindoctor Andy Coulson, who had edited the paper before being signed up by the Tory leader, increased the sense that this is a government ageing prematurely. The overall impression is of a somewhat slapdash administration travelling without either a map or a compass but implementing some useful changes along the way. "We must not forget that Cameron is," a colleague of mine remarked ruefully recently, "very much a seat of the pants kind of guy."

And yet, this summer when a shooting in Tottenham and demonstrations about police tactics mutated into a sickening spree of looting, or "shopping with violence", in other parts of the capital and beyond, there was a glimpse of a different Cameron. It suggested that all might not quite be lost.

After the riots the Tory leader showed again how well he can respond under pressure. His pitch-perfect reaction was classic Cameron. Leaving it late is one of his well-established traits. He got his act together for his A-levels, for his finals at Oxford and in the Tory leadership contest only at five minutes to midnight. His middle names, jokes a colleague, might as well be "Justin Time".

Holidaying in a rented palazzo in Tuscany in early August, he made the decision to head back to Britain with only hours to spare. That night television news channels were carrying deeply disturbing images. The rioting was spreading beyond the enclaves where the underclass created by decades of counter-productive welfarism, moral relativism and leftist educational betrayal are usually contained. Solidly respectable Ealing was ablaze and London, in a temporary form of lockdown, felt unsafe.

By arriving when he did, just as the police toughened their tactics, it looked as though the PM had helped restore order (a primary duty for any Tory prime minister). Then he made powerful speeches that were refreshingly conservative in tone and content, diagnosing a moral malaise in parts of British society. He referenced the misguided 40-year war conducted against the family by middle- class liberals. That he was accused portentously by the ultra-liberal New York Times of "divisive moralising" suggested he was doing something right.