Remember what you once were

FOR the first time since becoming prime minister in 2010, David Cameron can look forward to addressing his Conservative Party’s annual conference on October 2nd with more relish than dread. His party does not love him. Its members, typically more right-wing and ornery than Britain’s smooth and instinctively liberal leader, have not forgiven him for failing to secure a majority against an enfeebled Labour Party in 2010, forcing him into coalition with the Liberal Democrats. The City distrusts him, just as he disowns it. His MPs, especially those whose names he struggles to remember, resent his small circle of well-heeled advisers. The Tory press loathe him: it is hard to think of a Conservative prime minister with fewer allies in Fleet Street. Yet the Tory tribes like a winner, and Mr Cameron’s prospects are looking up. The question is whether an able but complacent man will seize his chance to be the radical centrist he once promised to be.