Bruce Anderson: Cameron looks too happy for his own good

Though it is hard for an essentially gruntled character to appeal to the disgruntled, he will have to try,

David Cameron was a little anxious before last Wednesday's Prime Minister's questions. Because of the recess, he had not held a bat in his hands for three months and he felt that his chosen lines of attack were predictable. Tony Blair would surely have prepared ambushes and minefields. In the event, Mr Cameron brushed the PM aside with disdainful ease. Mr Blair was playing like a man who had never held a bat in his life.

Later on in the week, he was equally unimpressive on television, both on Ireland and on General Dannatt, whose victory was as complete as David Cameron's. None of this would have happened if Tony Blair had still been Prime Minister. On Friday and Saturday, there was speculation that Richard Dannatt might get the sack. That was never possible. It would have done too much damage to the Government's standing. Indeed, the army boot is on the other foot. Ministers are no longer dealing with Mike Jackson, a rumbustuous weakling. Richard Dannatt is quietly spoken but has convictions of steel. If he were pushed across a red line, he would resign. Ministers know that, and dare not risk it.

The smell of death from the Blair administration is unmistakable. It is decomposing while still in office. The triumphant speech in Manchester might as well have never been delivered. I wrote last week that almost the entire press corps now thinks that David Cameron will become PM. This week, an ambassador told me that the same is true of the diplomatic corps. No wonder Tory morale is so high.

Higher than it ought to be, for there are still problems. Mr Cameron has made advances against a moribund opponent. All the poll evidence suggests, and a large number of Labour MPs believe, that he will do better still against Gordon Brown. But there is no sign as yet of a poll breakthrough into the mid-forties.

Here, the conventional wisdom points in opposite directions. On the one hand, polls in recent years have tended to underestimate Tory support. On the other, governments traditionally do badly in mid-terms, then recover as the election approaches. Tony Blair broke that rule; he almost always did well. But it could be that normal pre-Blair politics is reasserting itself. In that case, the Tories should be worried. Until 1997, a mere six-point deficit at this stage of a Parliament would not have alarmed a government.

It appears that Mr Cameron is doing well among women and in much of the south of England. But this is not replicated north of the Trent. There are a lot of marginals up north; the Tories cannot win without taking a good chunk of them. That will need a reorientation of strategy. Mr Cameron has to do more to appeal to a public mood of anger.

I suspect that the state has never been more unpopular with the English middle and lower-middle classes. A great number of people believe that they are being overtaxed by an incompetent government. Nor is this just a matter of income tax. Council tax, every charge one can think of, many voters feel that in dealing with the authorities, they are playing a losing game of Monopoly. Whenever they land on a square, there is a fresh demand for cash.

At the same time, the state and its servants have never seemed so bossy and intrusive. There has been a widespread outbreak of what was once known as little Hitlerism, describing the tendency of petty officials to use the war as an excuse for ordering people around. It is impossible to open a mass-market newspaper without seeing stories about government waste, interference with ordinary citizens and proposals to give officials new powers of harassment, including on-the-spot fines. This all makes the readers seethe.

Nor should we underrate the effect of the various Muslim controversies. To a lot of voters, it seems as if an alien minority is manipulating the law to achieve its own aims, while feeling no sense of obligation or allegiance to our nation. This adds to the feeling that the country people knew and loved is slipping away from them. Those who think like that need to be persuaded that there is a point in voting Tory rather than staying at home or switching to BNP/UKIP.

This is not easy for Mr Cameron. He has no intention of turning Poujadist and he is not anti-state. Thatcherism had no theory of the state. In her body language, Mrs Thatcher seemed to be saying that apart from the armed forces and the police, the state was an unprivatisable residue and that those who worked for it had made a morally inferior choice of career.

Chris Patten tried to put a phrase of Carlisle's in some of her early speeches: that the state should be far more than "anarchy plus the constable". She often gave the impression of thinking that Carlisle was wrong. Mr Cameron is determined to eradicate that impression. Although he knows that not every doctor, nurse, teacher, or conscientious civil servant will vote Tory in the next election, he does not want any of them to go into the polling booth thinking that he is their enemy.

But Mrs Thatcher had one advantage which he lacks. There was a lot of anger in her personality, not to mention a certain amount of poujadism. She could appeal to the malcontents who did not think much of the government. Nor, often, did she, even while she was running it.

David Cameron cannot match that creative schizophrenia. He is too balanced to feel the restless aggression that drove her - and he is an optimist. This is nothing to do with the so-called privileged background. It is merely that he is happy in his own skin: a harmonious state which a great number of his fellow countrymen do not share. He also possesses the mental, moral, emotional and physical stamina to cope with a desperately handicapped child and a mildly stressful job.

Though it is bound to be hard for an essentially gruntled character to appeal to the disgruntled, Mr Cameron will have to try, for they are part of his core constituency. While sticking to the line he has taken on fiscal responsibility, he must do more to offer the hope of tax cuts. Above all, he should tell the voters what they all know already: that this government is wasting a great deal of their money, because it never took any interest in obtaining value for money. There is nothing wrong with spending a lot on health and education, as long as the result is world-class services, not world-class waste.

Up to now, Mr Cameron has concentrated on topics which enable him to sound caring and likeable. In future, he will have to make tough points on harder-edged issues, without using excessively abrasive language. Fortunately for his party, he is a good enough politician to do this. The connoisseurs of political warfare can only regret that he never had the chance to take on Tony Blair in his prime.