By his own lights David Cameron is failing. He said he wanted to modernise the Tory party. And yet the Conservative party today is more old-fashioned, more out of touch and wealthier than it has been since 1963-64 when Sir Alec Douglas-Home was in charge. Many of the men in the cabinet are millionaires. There are few women of prominence and only four are senior ministers. The sole ethnic-minority woman, Baroness Warsi, has been hounded from the party chairmanship. And Steve Hilton, on whom so many hopes of modernisation had rested, has gone back to California.

The party is divided on Europe (again), obsessing about immigration (again) and tempted to tack to the right to counter the UKIP threat. It is understandable that so many people, who are struggling to pay the bills, now say that they don't think the party understands their concerns.

Bizarrely, the only thing that has been progressive recently is the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act. And though I wholeheartedly support the legislation, it does not fit into any kind of strategy of wider participation of women or minorities, nor is it part of a bigger drive to encourage marriage like tax breaks. It stands alone as a piece of policy without context. No wonder it has bemused many traditional Conservatives. And no wonder a majority of Tory MPs voted against it. 

Cameron does not seem to have any idea where he is leading the country. Most great leaders do. The vision thing can be oversold, but in hard times people need to know why they are going through the pain and that it will be better at the end. Yet as Steve Bell in his Guardian cartoons so aptly portrays there is something sadomasochistic about the government's approach. We are expected to endure pain for pain's sake. The objective is not clear and so the method is questionable — no fiddling of the figures or there-is-no-alternative speeches are going to make that better.