Bernard Ingham: Cameron must keep promises and restore pride

The parallel with Margaret Thatcher is remarkable. Nobody expected her to change the nature of Britain when she came to office in 1979. Many thought she would make things worse – as her medicine did for a time. But then 16 months into her tenure she told her party conference where she stood and later sacked the Wets. She never looked back.

Similarly, not many reposed much hope in Cameron last year when he took charge of a bankrupt country with the Liberal Democrats around his neck in a coalition. There are many Conservatives who doubt whether he means what he says when apparently effortlessly he rises to events. He is truly Prime Ministerial. But deep down does he actually believe in anything?

To be fair, he has retained the markets’ trust in his pledge to bring down spending and borrowing and restore balance to the national finances, even though he is counter-productively profligate on overseas aid and fundamentally wrong in pursuing an energy policy that saps growth and will eventually de-industrialise Britain.

In his better moments, he suggests a certain moral force behind his desire to end Britain’s 50-year moral decline, led by the liberal Left, from standards of discipline, behaviour and attainment that led to last week’s appalling riots. But has he got what it takes to repair his “broken society”?

Sixteen months into his premiership, he is going to have to set out his stall at his party conference. Then – and this is the hardest part – he will have to fulfil his promises. Margaret Thatcher would not now be respected, if not necessarily liked, the world over if her policies had failed. By 2015 the British people – and certainly the English – will have to feel that the country has changed and become a more rigorous society that rewards personal responsibility and effort and cracks down hard on layabouts and unruly elements. One of the indicators of this will be how the police meanwhile deal with anti-social behaviour and control town centres at weekends.

If they are still as lackadaisical, burdened by leaders who have forgotten that they are paid to maintain law and order and terrified of being accused of being anything less than gentle, then Cameron is a dead political duck.

He will have no excuses. Unlike Margaret Thatcher into her second year, he has the nation behind him. The people want the mob, the thuggery, the criminality and the appalling parental neglect sorted out once and for all. They want an end to sociologists’ excuses and some real bite in the education system where teachers control the classroom.

I am not pretending this will be easy. In fact, it will be extremely difficult and will require an iron will, especially as Sir Hugh Orde, chairman of the Association of Chief Police Officers, seems arrogantly to consider his duty to be the voice of a failed vested interest.

But Orde is not the only problem. He would not be so bold if he had chief constables telling him to shut up. I suspect the Home Office, like the Education Department, is still stuffed with doctrinal do-gooders who see anyone who holds the view, as I do, that you spare the rod and spoil the child as Neanderthal.

In fact, judging by its performance, the entire judicial system is pretty useless and regularly lets down the ordinary copper who takes the blows that feral inner-city youth rain down on him.

We also know that the Liberal Democrat hierarchy will do their best to prevent any change. After all, Simon Hughes, their deputy leader, insists long-term solutions lie in redistributing wealth (Ye Gods! after all that looting), not slashing help.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the Establishment may well try to stand in the way of Cameron, Michael Gove and Iain Duncan Smith. They must be thrust aside. They have failed the people miserably with their obeisance to “human rights” to the exclusion of responsibilities.

Cameron and his men must stand up now for the responsible, law-abiding, tax-paying, decent majority and the ordinary policeman who wants to protect them. Let it never be forgotten that the politicians have failed us, too.

The time has come for Cameron to restore a nation’s self respect. He had better not fail.