Bernard Ingham: Coalition is stopping Cameron from being his own man

I think I worry least about Ed Miliband. He has had such a lousy start that things can only get better. He may surprise us all, though I doubt it.

He has nonetheless made progress, thanks largely to Europe, NHS reform and a dip in David Cameron’s Parliamentary form. He is not to be written off. Time is now on his side.

This would be an encouraging assessment if he were consistently making hay out of the coalition’s economic travails and its regular disarray. Sadly, he isn’t, which is not good for the governance of this country. To repeat myself, every decent government needs a strong, harassing opposition.

It is the coalition’s disarray that causes me to fret about Nick Clegg. Let me be clear: I hold no candle for the Lib Dem leader. Instead, my interest in him is that of a curiosity.

Here is a man whose entire political being is governed by two objectives: to maintain apparent support for the Government’s debt reduction strategy while at the same time differentiating his party from the Conservatives with an eye on the next election.

At the best of times, this would be an interesting balancing act but it becomes positively curious when most of the differentiation flies in the face of public sentiment, recently over Europe and a benefit cap of £26,000.

Generally speaking, the past 22 months have shown that Clegg is in coalition with the wrong party. He would be much happier having a slice of the action with Labour rather than the Tories, who are finding their Lib Dem allies increasingly frustrating.

Perhaps he sees a future in a permanently hung Parliament from which he picks his coalition partner. He cannot count on that but what else is there left for Lib Dems to dream about?

Which brings me to Cameron, who worries me most. I don’t have much time for peacetime coalitions. One consequence of our present one is that we are cutting debt too slowly and thereby prolonging the agony. This raises the question as to who is being damaged more by the coalition – Cameron or Clegg.

The truth is that in many ways No 10 has been good for Cameron. He looks authoritatively Prime Ministerial in a slightly well-fed, schoolboyish way – or am I getting old? He has a good presence and speaking voice and handles the world he meets in a vigorous, positive way.

He mostly gets it right, except when he comes over all matey and resorts to such advertising slogans as “Calm down, dear”, though I must say, being politically incorrect, that offended me not at all.

But – and this is a big but – he has never been able in coalition to develop a clear, consistent Conservative or popularly Eurosceptic line. He has to spend too much time keeping the peace. Since he cannot easily sack a Lib Dem, he has to pick and choose where to insist.

Evidently, he does not think preventing Vincent Cable from appointing a previously anonymous academic with silly ideas from becoming the nation’s university “fair access tsar” is worth a row.

He may be right, especially if nobody takes a blind bit of notice of Professor Les Ebdon, but it does not go down well with the Tory rank and file.

This is the problem. Coalition is preventing Cameron from becoming his own man. Put another way, it is tending to confirm among his natural supporters that he governs by jumping from one issue to the next, pledging solutions he cannot deliver, without any really strong feelings about anything. A surface skimmer.

Some Tories say it is too clever by half. Ed Miliband dismisses it as all presentation and no substance.

My worry about all this is that Cameron may have been just the man we needed in May 2010 when, as a nation, we fluffed it at the polls. But, in doing his national duty, he may well be diminished by it. That would be a pity, given his manifest gifts, which put him head and shoulders above his contemporaries.

If I were handling him, I would be calling for less style and more weight and depth.

I never had that problem with Margaret Thatcher. This is perhaps why I worry that Cameron will come to be seen as just a PR chappie.

A fate worse than death.