Keep calm and vote Dave

“A GREAT British take-off that leaves no one behind,” proclaimed David Cameron in the peroration of his speech to the Conservative Party conference on October 7th. This was his nod to “The Great British Bake Off”, an improbably popular televised baking contest whose final would be broadcast that evening. The slogan concluded a strikingly centrist address in which the prime minister encouraged his right-wing activists—the usual mix of prematurely balding young men and white-haired pensioners—to applaud international aid, gay marriage and Britain’s membership of the EU. They did not mind: this was the man whose popularity (as the only major leader to outpoll his party) had in May produced the first Tory majority for 23 years.

His success breaks several of the golden rules of politics. Mr Cameron’s five years as prime minister have been defined by deep cuts to the state, none of which clouded the sky when he became leader in 2005. New cuts to tax credits will leave low earners poorer, in spite of a higher minimum wage. The prime minister is haughtily upper-class—a distant cousin of the queen, no less—in a country where everyone used to hail the “classless society”. A new biography, “Call Me Dave”, alleges that as a member of a posh dining club at Oxford University Mr Cameron got up to some strange antics with a dead pig (a claim he denies). His popularity baffles foreigners: in a memo to Hillary Clinton in 2010 an adviser pooh-poohed the “aristocratic, narrowly Etonian” clique that would henceforth run Britain.