Bruce Anderson: David Cameron has caught the public mood and wrong-footed Tony Blair

Labour is worried. Tony Blair's political instincts have failed him; these days, they often do. On the family question, the PM misread the public mood and David Cameron seized the initiative. Labour does not know how to respond. Some cabinet ministers are still reluctant to talk about the family, for fear of sounding hostile to single mothers. Others are uneasily aware that most voters are not single mothers - and that Mr Cameron has managed to extol the family without sounding intolerant.

Tony Blair did not go astray because he lacked intellectual arguments. It is alarming that young black drug dealers are shooting each other in south London. There is a law and order problem. But Mr Blair is right; that is only true in a very small area. It does not mean that British society is fractured.

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Equally, David Cameron was stretching his case when he said that wealth creation should not take priority over social well-being. Why are the two necessarily antithetical? The south London boys may have been running wild because their fathers were never around. This does not mean that the dads were working 80-hour weeks for a hedge-fund.

Yet Mr Blair's arguments are irrelevant. Occasionally, dispassionate intellectualism is overwhelmed by dramatic events. A single incident suddenly symbolises an entire horizon of social problems. It may be that only a tiny minority of youngsters will commit murder. But a much larger number are enduring an upbringing which is defective in love, order, discipline and values. When he talks about this, David Cameron is articulating the anxieties of tens of millions of decent people.

Nor should the Tory leader be accused of opportunism. He has not stumbled on the family. He has spent a year deploying both arguments and body language to lay foundations for a new Tory family policy. The body language was crucial. Mr Cameron is tolerant. He has no objection to homosexuals bringing up children. He knows that there will always be single mothers and that sexual mores have changed. How many people now believe in virgin brides?

Mr Cameron does believe that as many children as possible should be brought up by their two parents in stable families. But he was determined to make that point in a humane way. When they talked about families, some traditional Tories sounded as if they wanted an excuse to denounce sin and deviancy. Mr Cameron emphatically rejects all that, and his political assessment is in harmony with his principles. He believes that old-fashioned Tory prejudice would neither win the argument nor win over the voters.

The so-called "hug a hoodie'' speech was part of this new approach. David Cameron did not use those words. Indeed, as he read some philosophy at Oxford, he will not even say, "I did not say 'hug a hoodie','' - because then he would have done.

But he was talking about affection. He insisted that punishment was not enough. We had to try to understand why these youngsters were so alienated and troublesome. In so doing, we would find that the answer almost always lay in fractured family relationships. The hoodie criminals would never have eaten a meal round a table, at a set time, with parents asking about their school day. Most of them would have lived in households which were more like an animal's den, where junk food bought with stolen money arrived at unpredictable intervals, to be gobbled against the blare of television - and no one gave a damn about the school day.

It is easy to describe the problem: much harder to find solutions. The decline of marriage is at the root of almost all our contemporary social ills. The jails and the lunatic asylums are filled with the sweepings of broken homes. But this is all part of a profound change in social ethos, linked to the decline of God. The crumbling of religion, especially the belief in immortality, has created a vacuum easily filled by personal gratification. If there is no God to please, people may as well please themselves.

It is not clear that any government could deal with this. There are those who argue that this government has made matters worse by removing the tax incentives to marry and remain married. That was an unwise move. But we must not be too vulgar Marxist. Most people do not marry or divorce with one eye on the tax code.

Gordon Brown is often criticised, and rightly, for believing that re-jigging tax allowances will stimulate economic growth. But if he is wrong about the psychology of businessmen, it would be vulgar Brownism to claim that tinkering with tax would preserve marriage. It might help at the margin. This is not a marginal problem.

David Cameron has another approach: cultural attitudes. He draws an analogy with drunken driving. A generation ago, that was still socially acceptable. Lots of men still regarded the breathalyser as an underhand trick to give the bobbies an unfair advantage. Those who were caught were widely regarded as unlucky. That has all changed. A drunken driver is now a social pariah. So why not bring similar pressure to bear upon negligent fathers?

It could also be argued that the problem is not so much negligent fatherhood, as young men who do not care what happens to their seed. If that is true, we ought to re-examine sex education in schools. It is unnecessary to labour the point among boys. However much they are told about the consequences, they cannot wait to get on with the deed. Nor is it important to sensitise children about alternative lifestyles. That can happen in their ordinary social exchanges.

There is only one reason to subsidise sex education from the public purse: to dissuade schoolgirls from becoming pregnant. In Holland, a girl teenager is seven times less likely to become pregnant than her British counterpart. It seems unlikely that she has seven times less sex. The Dutch are doing something right. We should find out what it is, and copy it.

There is a further argument for a bold departure from conventional wisdom. It is time to eliminate the final vestiges of the sacramental approach to marriage. The state should not try to uphold Christian sexual morality. Childless married couples who wish to divorce should be able to do so in about 10 months, with no further complication than is involved in unscrambling a landlord/tenant contract or an employer/employee relationship. But couples with children should be required to wait much longer.

The state has no interest in insisting that those whom God has joined together should never be split asunder. But the state should aim to secure a happy upbringing for children. David Cameron understands all this. Like the young Tony Blair, he has the capacity to speak to his own generation but also to admiring older voters. His beliefs on the family are sincere. He is a long way from turning them into reality. But in the interim, it is extremely good politics.

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