© Ellie Foreman Peck 

There is something slightly fly about David Cameron. Or as Robin Harris, former director of the Conservative Research Department and Cameron's first employer, put it: "I don't think that in any shape or form he could be described as a Conservative in philosophical terms. He has no principled sense of direction; his only sense of direction is upwards. The opportunism he displays is deplorable."

David Cameron is not very nice. The only time I met him he was leader of the opposition and annoyed to have been introduced to me. He showed his displeasure by clicking his heels like a petulant Prussian aristocrat as he shook my hand. I had expected charm at the very least and, even though I understood why he was irritated to have been distracted from some powerplay of his own, I was surprised.

I had thought of Cameron as being a normal modern leader, a man whom the Tories had chosen because he was not weird like Michael Howard, Iain Duncan Smith or William Hague. But instead I was faced with a throwback to a bygone age which I was only dimly aware still existed.

It is this clinging to entitlement which is most strange about Cameron and leads some people to overrate him. But it is not enough to expect privilege, upbringing and money to give you the "right instincts" to rule. And it is that mixture of desire for power with petulance and a very limited sense of the strategic which marks Cameron out as a second-rate leader.