HE HAS led the Conservative Party for more than four years and is the man most likely to lead Britain after the general election this spring. Yet people still wonder just who David Cameron is. This is not because he hides what he does or fudges what he thinks, as those on the receiving end of countless webcameron flashes and unending policy e-mails can attest. It is, rather, that his views are not always those of either his party or, perhaps, of his age.
The Economist talked to Mr Cameron on March 29th, in the last of a series of on-the-record interviews with the leaders of the three main political parties. Though only 15 years younger than Gordon Brown, prime minister and leader of the Labour Party, he seems of a different generation, with an easy, human touch that Mr Brown often struggles to achieve. He has more obviously in common with the similarly 40-ish, six-foot-tall leader of the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg. But Mr Cameron is an altogether slicker number, and a far more experienced political operator.
Those looking for the Big Idea from Mr Cameron will be disappointed. He has a very English scepticism about grand theories. His identity lies somewhere between liberal London, where he has spent his adult life, and the conservative Home Counties, where he grew up. Ironically for a man whose Euroscepticism has irked Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, he may at heart be what continental Europeans would recognise as a Christian Democrat. He espouses a social conservatism that dwells on broad issues, such as the cultural causes of poverty, not on the narrow lifestyle questions such as gay rights (on which he is anyway tolerant) that obsess some on the American right. He is an Atlanticist, though not a passionate one, and a gentle free-marketeer.
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