IN ANTHONY TROLLOPE’S NOVELPhineas Redux, Mr. Daubeny, a prime minister modeled on Benjamin Disraeli, proudly announces, “See what we Conservatives can do. In fact we will conserve nothing when we find that you do not desire to have it conserved any longer.” It’s a credo that Prime Minister David Cameron appears to live by.

Among a crowded field of contenders, Cameron may be the slipperiest Briton ever to have successfully climbed the greasy pole. We read his name in the papers. We see his face on our televisions and computer screens, yet nobody is quite sure who he really is or what he is doing. Buying muffins for his children? Tending to weighty matters of state? Conscientious servant? Rank opportunist? He has been at the forefront of British public life for almost a decade, yet all definitions slide off him. He has been prime minister for nearly four years, but his agenda remains no more than an aspiration. As the journalist Alex Massie recently asked, “What is David Cameron for?”

We used to think we knew: “Dave” was a modernizer. In 2005, when Cameron first rose to prominence, the British Conservative Party seemed ruined. The Tories had lost several elections in a row. They were distrusted, reviled, “the nasty party.” They needed a savior: in breezed Cameron. Only a few months earlier, nobody outside Westminster Village—London’s equivalent of the Beltway—had heard of him. His only brush with the big time had come in his twenties when he worked as a special adviser to Norman Lamont, the chancellor of the exchequer, and then Michael Howard, the home secretary. In the footage of “Black Wednesday,” September 16, 1992, when Britain announced the withdrawal of its currency from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, you can see the twenty-six-year-old Cameron, his hair and suit unruffled, standing behind Lamont as he addresses the cameras outside Downing Street with the momentous news.

Cameron went on to have a successful career as a PR man at the media firm Carlton Communications, where he fine-tuned his genius for news management. He returned to politics as a member of Parliament in 2001 and quickly emerged as a first-rate public speaker, the outstanding figure among a group of young center-righters on a mission to “detoxify” the Tory brand and drag their party into the twenty-first century. He went to great lengths to appear as un-Tory as he possibly could. He wore Converse trainers and quoted Gandhi. He promised “compassionate conservatism” and talked about sharing the proceeds of growth. Politics, for him and his camarilla, was about “achieving progressive ends through conservative means,” whatever that meant. He bicycled around London and preached about the environment. He changed the party logo from a flaming torch of liberty to a green-and-blue tree. He lauded gay marriage and sneered at the “headbangers” on his right.

There were grumbles from the old guard. Peter Hitchens (brother of the even more famous Christopher) accused Cameron of having “mopped up the last-remaining puddles of moral, social and cultural conservatism.” Lord Saatchi, the advertising guru and former Conservative Party chairman, called Cameron’s entourage the “say anything to get elected” Tories. But most British right-wingers—a practical more than an ideological bunch—were cheered by the thought that, finally, the Conservative Party had found a winner. Cameron bested his rival David Davis, a more robustly right-wing type, took his party by storm, or at least by the neck, and instantly established himself as a popular public figure.

THERE WAS ANOTHER ASPECT of Cameron that everyone understood: he was privileged—not an aristocrat, exactly, but upper-middle class enough to be seen by almost every voter as “posh.” An Old Etonian and Oxford man who mingled among a circle of similarly smart and successful friends—the “Notting Hill set”—he seemed almost typecast from one of those soppy Richard Curtis comedy films such as Love Actually, in which English toffs roam around London being self-deprecating and charming.

Experts suggested that Cameron’s elite background meant he would never hold mass appeal. They were wrong. In the middle of the last decade, Britain was feeling affluent and strangely unburdened by notions of class. Cameron’s poshness was a good joke, and it infuriated committed socialists, but the public didn’t feel put off. Indeed, the media, even on the left, were infatuated by Cameron’s glamour. Successful journalists in Britain tend to have liberal values and come from the richer parts of London, so even if they despised Tories they could at least identify with Cameron—someone who came from money but tried to be enlightened. The Cameroons—Cameron’s immediate circle—had tailored their message specifically to placate the BBC and the Guardian, Britain’s most important lefty institutions. Meanwhile, the new-look Tory combination of enthusiasm for free markets and progressive social attitudes—mixed with social pedigree—made the party attractive again to the power brokers at News International, Rupert Murdoch’s empire, who had fallen for Tony Blair in the 1990s. This particular alliance turned out to be acutely toxic—following the great phone-hacking scandal—but in the last decade it was still considered invaluable in politics. The Sun, Britain’s most-read tabloid, embraced the Cameron project, as did the Times.

When, in 2007, Blair stepped down to be replaced by the more robustly left-wing figure of Gordon Brown, Cameron’s stock rose further still. The self-appointed “heir to Blair,” Cameron appeared destined to capture the center back from New Labour. He was the good guy in British politics; Brown was a thug.

But then disaster struck in the form of the global financial crash. Cameron found himself stranded: having maneuvered the Tories to the middle, he found that the atom of Blairite centrism—with its faith in the unifying power of neoliberal and global economics—had started to split. People were scared and wanted something more than platitudes and spin from their politicians. Brown veered left, virtually nationalizing the bankrupt banking system and presenting himself as a megastatist hero of the future. Cameron could not be seen to support Brown’s dangerous overhaul of the economy, but he also didn’t want to be viewed as unpatriotic during a crisis. He floundered, while “Super Gordon” enjoyed a bizarre political revival. Suddenly, too, the posh factor counted against Cameron: nobody wanted an Old Etonian in charge at a time of real emergency.

The “Brown bounce” didn’t last. It did, however, expose a real weakness in Cameron’s position. He needed to reassure voters that he stood for something more than his own personal advancement and that he had deep answers to the big questions posed by the crash. He needed “the vision thing,” as George H. W. Bush called it. Cameron had always said that his “progressive conservatism” had intellectual roots, but now, with the 2010 general election looming and the global crisis ongoing, he had an urgent PR need to spell it out. Encouraged by Steve Hilton, his director of strategy, and Oliver Letwin, the shadow cabinet policy coordinator, Cameron began talking about Edmund Burke and the importance of “little platoons” in civil society. He had a curious flirtation with the political philosopher Philip Blond, a “new localist” who believed that the financial crisis had created an opportunity to revive the neglected tradition of “red Toryism.” “British conservatism,” wrote Blond in a much-discussed essay in Prospect, “must not . . . repeat the American error of preaching ‘morals plus the market’ while ignoring the fact that economic liberalism has often been a cover for monopoly capitalism and is therefore just as socially damaging as left-wing statism.” At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Cameron expressed his concern that “someone working in the local branch of a global corporation can feel like little more than flotsam in some vast international sea of business.” Elsewhere, he seized on a report by Demos, the London-based think tank, about the value of stable families, those littlest platoons. “Parenting is the coalface of creating character,” he said, in a deep voice, to some applause.

ALL THIS HIGH-MINDED WAFFLE came to a head in the Conservative Party’s election manifesto in 2010, which laid out the party’s vision for the “Big Society”—a Brave New Even Greater Britain in which the state would empower individuals or small groups to make life better for everyone. The central government would act as the enabler of “social entrepreneurship,” cutting away red tape and pushing the petty bureaucracies aside to enable true localism to prosper.

It was much too grandiose an idea for British politics, and duly backfired. The concept sounded suspiciously intellectual to common sense–loving Tories—it didn’t help that the Big Society’s acronym was “BS”—and the public could not process the idea that the nasty party wanted to be nice, actually. Critics on the left smelled a Tory rat: those cruel right-wingers were at it again, they said, scrapping vital public services and dressing it up as benevolence. Polly Toynbee, the influential Guardian columnist, called the Big Society a “big fat lie.” Under pressure from his more hands-on shadow ministers, Cameron promptly ditched the BS and started campaigning again on practical policies. But the damage had been done: soon after their Big Society manifesto was published, the Conservatives’ poll ratings dipped, and they did not recover sufficiently to win an outright majority. Today, Cameron still uses the words “Big Society” from time to time as a feel-good line in the odd speech—in his 2013 Christmas message, for instance—but it’s hardly a model for reforming the nation. He would never again make the mistake of trying to be too profound.

The general election of May 6, 2010, resulted in a hung Parliament. The Conservatives had only a plurality. To form a proper government, they would have to enter into coalition with the Liberal Democrats. For a few days, however, uncertainty ruled. The loathed Gordon Brown did not leave Downing Street. It looked, for a day or two, as if the left-leaning Liberal Democrats might enter into coalition with Labour instead of the Conservatives. A charm offensive was needed: here Cameron came into his element. He quickly forged a close bond with the Liberal Democratic leader Nick Clegg—another privately educated man (Westminster) with whom Cameron has more in common than he does with many Tories. As Labour sulked, Cameron and his negotiators offered the most generous terms to their prospective government partners. Sure enough, on May 12, Cameron and Clegg appeared together in the Downing Street Rose Garden to announce their political marriage to the world. Cameron was prime minister, at last, and Clegg would be his deputy. It looked, at least for a few hours, like a triumph.

THAT WAS THEN. Ever since, Tory policy decisions usually have involved resistance—often in public—from the Lib Dems, Britain’s most leftward-leaning political party. Cameron insists that his administration has proved itself resilient—“it does what it says on the tin,” he said, quoting a well-known varnish commercial—and it’s true that the “Lib-Con” union has survived its first term in reasonable condition, in large part thanks to the working relationship between Cameron and Clegg. But often the two men have been tugged apart by their respective bases. Cynics may say that Cameron has been able to use the Lib Dems as an excuse to be less and less conservative. But sharing power has both narrowed and broadened the prime minister’s political scope. On some issues, Cameron and Clegg have been able to sing from the same liberal hymn sheet—for instance, in legalizing gay marriage last year. But, in exchange for supporting the Tories, the Lib Dems have been eager to present themselves as the coalition’s progressive force, holding back the rabid right-wingers. This has proved tricky for Cameron, precisely because it is exactly the image of himself that he liked to project. Governing in a coalition has forced him to be less left-liberal, especially because these days he faces an insurgent challenge from the right in the form of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). Ferociously Euroskeptic and led by the charismatic Nigel Farage, the UKIP has been attracting ever-larger numbers of disaffected Tory traditionalists. As a result, Cameron has repeatedly felt compelled to reassure grassroots supporters that, au fond, he remains one of them. So Dave the once-proud environmentalist has found himself being quoted as saying that he wants to “cut the green crap”—though aides deny that phrase was ever uttered. And Dave the Tory leader who once told his party to stop “banging on about Europe” has found himself committed to an “in/out” referendum as to Britain’s future within the European Union. He particularly infuriated Clegg, an outright eurofederalist, by effectively vetoing an EU treaty change on the grounds of protecting Britain’s national interest.

The constraints of coalition have not, however, prevented Cameron’s government from attempting radical public-sector reform on a number of fronts. The coalition has attempted to revolutionize state education (inspired in part by the U.S. model of charter schools), revamp the administration of the National Health Service (NHS), overhaul the dysfunctional welfare system, and—most of all—tackle Britain’s economic crisis and its immense debt problem. For these reasons, at the end of 2013, the Daily Telegraph’s Peter Oborne called the prime minister “the great reformer.” “Mr. Cameron,” he wrote, “has had to cope with economic crisis, a mutinous Tory party, a coalition government and a fractious media. But in his first three years in office he has already a more solid record of domestic achievement than Tony Blair can boast over a full decade.”

Is it possible that behind the superficial front Cameron really is a great conservative pragmatist? Again, it’s hard to say. Effective domestic reform is, as Oborne says, hard and unglamorous work, only recognized in the long term. But there is a lingering suspicion that Cameron’s enthusiasm for announcing big policy ideas is not matched by a willingness to go through the heavier, less exciting slog of implementing them. The coalition’s reforms have in fact been something of a mixed bag so far. On schools, thanks to his energetic minister for education, Michael Gove, Cameron has made progress. But only 174 so-called free schools have opened in the last three years, and Britain’s slide down the international education rankings continues. The effort to reshape the welfare system has great public support, but has been ruined by bureaucratic mistakes. The ambitious shake-up of the NHS has been reduced to a step-by-step managerial effort. And while the economy is showing clear signs of improvement, the “green shoots” are growing off ever-vaster levels of government borrowing. For all the talk of austerity and cuts, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne has actually increased state spending in real terms: In 2009–2010, public-sector current expenditure, adjusted to 2011–2012 prices, was £634.2 billion. By 2012–2013, it was reportedly around £647.1 billion.

At the same time, Cameron’s reputation as a good man has been undermined by the never-ending phone-hacking scandal. The story began as a series of revelations that Rupert Murdoch–owned newspapers had been illegally intercepting celebrity voicemails. By 2011, after incessant pushing by the Guardian, the BBC and the New York Times, whose own motives are not hard to fathom, it had transformed into a wide-ranging exposé of the entire political-media matrix through which Britain is run. Cameron was compromised first by the fact that his director of communications, the tabloid man Andy Coulson, had resigned in 2007 as editor of the News of the World following the first round of hacking reports. Cameron’s decision to appoint Coulson only seven months later—and stand by him as the allegations intensified—raised serious doubts about his judgment. Coulson finally stepped down in January 2011, but the problem would not go away. Cameron subsequently established an official inquiry into “the culture, practices and ethics of the press,” presumably in a bid to make himself look above reproach, but the decision caused him acute embarrassment when his turn came to answer questions. The lead counsel, Robert Jay, humiliated the prime minister by reading out a series of flirtatious text messages between him and Coulson’s successor at theNews of the World, the red-haired Rebekah Brooks, who lived near him and was a close friend. Nothing else could have so perfectly encapsulated the cozy complicity of the political and media elite. In one cringe-inducing message, Cameron thanked Brooks for letting him ride one of her family’s horses (“fast, unpredictable and hard to control but fun”). In another, the day before one of his major speeches, she told him: “I am so rooting for you tomorrow not just as a proud friend but because professionally we’re definitely in this together! Speech of your life! Yes he Cam!” In the last decade, Cameron’s successful wooing of News International had made him look like a worthy prime-minister-in-waiting. In the more anxious 2010s, it made him look grubby and not a little absurd.

LIKE SO MANY LEADERS struggling at home, Cameron has found solace in adventure overseas. He always promised that he was no neoconservative: in a speech delivered on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, he had warmed many a realist heart by distinguishing between his liberal conservatism and the more hawkish variety. “We will serve neither our own, nor America’s, nor the world’s interests if we are seen as America’s unconditional associate in every endeavor,” he said. Democracy, he added, “cannot be imposed from outside. . . . Liberty grows from the ground—it cannot be dropped from the air by an unmanned drone.”

Yet Cameron’s instinctive liberalism—his impulse to be the good guy—also makes him a natural interventionist on humanitarian grounds, and in the civil war in Libya, he saw a conflict worth fighting. Cameron’s friends today insist that he was a reluctant warrior. His priority, like President Barack Obama’s, was to heal the economy and fix a broken society at home. The last thing he wanted was an expensive and energy-sapping military engagement. But as Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces rounded on Benghazi, and a terrible slaughter looked imminent, Cameron performed a volte-face and became a passionate advocate for intervention. It was Cameron—probably even more than the bellicose French president Nicolas Sarkozy—who applied the most external pressure on President Obama to intervene. (Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, along with Susan Rice and Samantha Power, did the twisting of Obama’s arm at home.)

We shouldn’t scoff at the thought that a prime minister wished above all to save lives. It would be naive, however, to suggest that political gain was not among Cameron’s motivations. The allied effort in Libya came at a time when coalition relations were at a low ebb. Far from being an unwanted distraction, Libya was a welcome one. Clegg, like Cameron, was no conventional hawk, but he too decided military action was the right course. Is it too cynical to say that the two men, exhausted after squabbling over issues such as university fees and social security, were pleased to have discovered an excellent adventure, a grand humanitarian mission, like gay marriage, upon which they could embark together?

Cameron, for his part, must have enjoyed playing the statesman on the global stage after a challenging few months, especially since it turned out that the military campaign was relatively quick, casualty free (for Britain at least) and successful in the short term. The drama of war excited the prime minister, too. According to the journalist Matthew D’Ancona, author of In It Together: The Inside Story of the Coalition Government, Cameron’s experience in Libya, in the words of one of his friends, was “the moment when Dave said to himself—‘wait a moment—I have the levers of power.’”

No matter whether Libya was a real foreign-policy success or not, the Cameroons were eager to claim the conflict as a big win for their man. He had saved the day. As another unnamed government source told D’Ancona, “Whenever things get bad, and the press is saying what a rubbish government we are, I remind myself that there are people alive in Benghazi tonight because we decided to take a risk.”

Cameron was so enthused by his Libya experience, in fact, that he soon adopted a gung-ho approach to the next major Arab conflict of Western interest. Spurred on by his wife Samantha, who in March 2013 had toured the country with the organization Save the Children, Cameron pushed hard for intervention against Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian civil war. Last August, he came back from holiday determined to act militarily following another round of reports that the Syrian president’s forces had used chemical weapons. The world could not “stand idly by” (that phrase again) as a dictator massacred his people, though, like Secretary of State John Kerry, Cameron utterly failed to spell out what the objectives of a strike would be.

As it turned out, the war effort flopped. In a rare flex of legislative muscle, Parliament bridled at the prospect of yet another intervention in the Middle East and narrowly rejected a vote sanctioning the use of force. It helped set the stage for President Obama’s own retreat from his red line, as the U.S. Congress, too, looked as though it would not serve as a rubber stamp for war, as it had before the Iraq imbroglio. And so Cameron the never-say-die human-rights warrior almost instantly reverted to Cameron the sober realist: “It is clear to me that the British parliament, reflecting the views of the British people, does not want to see British military action. I get that and the government will act accordingly.” He performed the metamorphosis so smoothly that some of his sharpest critics were left applauding his humility in the face of defeat.

One day, we may look back on Cameron as a heroic figure who only went to war reluctantly for the noblest causes, while at the same time pulling off massive political, economic and cultural reforms at home. But Cameron’s obvious impulsivity in foreign affairs suggests a far different verdict—a meretricious figure who would rush to war for the sake of his own conscience, or just some good headlines.

POLITICS MUST BE PERSONAL for Cameron, and it is PR. He has filled his government with his chums and he is loyal to them. One of the refreshing features of Cameron’s government has been that he gives his ministers autonomy within their various departments. He has moved away from the highly centralized “sofa cabinet” system of Tony Blair. But it is also often said that Cameron has a lazy streak. As long as he is winning the headline war against Labour, he doesn’t want to be bothered with the nitty-gritty of government battles. At first this claim seems incredible—a successful politician can’t possibly be idle. But Cameron does pride himself on being laid-back, focused on the bigger picture. He reportedly calls Fridays “thinking days” (which presumably means “not working days”) and can frequently be seen with his feet on his desk, drinking a beer.

In that sense, he is a typical Old Etonian: Britain’s most famous public school has a reputation for turning out supremely self-confident leaders who don’t sweat the small stuff. They have social inferiors to do that for them. Cameron’s critics also accuse him of “government by essay crisis”—a reference to his Oxford education. When things seem to be going well, he can be complacent; it takes a crisis to sting him into action.

One of Cameron’s nicknames is Flashman, the bully character in Tom Brown’s School Dayswho was turned into a great literary antihero by George MacDonald Fraser. He has a reputation for being rude, or, as the journalist Damian Thompson puts it: “He exhibits the calculated rudeness of people with very nice manners.” Cameron certainly has a temper. His opponents on the Labour front benches enjoy referring to the “crimson tide”—what the shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt described as “that half hour journey, every Question Time, during which the Prime Minister’s face turns from beatific calm to unedifying fury.” At the same time, however, he is an inveterate charmer, more than capable of buttering up his enemies if it provides him with an advantage.

As the 2015 general election approaches, Cameron is shifting shape yet again. He has brought in the Australian political strategist Lynton Crosby, a no-nonsense right-winger, to toughen up his image. At the same time, he has hired Barack Obama’s campaign manager Jim Messina, a lifelong Democrat. Just as Obama did in 2012, Cameron is now urging the electorate to let him “finish the job” by awarding him a second term. But the public does not seem willing to comply. The latest polls suggest that the Labour Party remains favored to win in 2015. If Cameron is ousted, he might try once more to imitate Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, setting up foundations and being a sort of global spokesman for hire. Or he could go back to the gilded life of the British toff: a good country house and some decent claret shared among a tight circle of influential and discreet friends. Who is the real David Cameron? We’ll probably never know, and he may not either.

Freddy Gray is managing editor of the Spectator.

Image: Flickr/World Economic Forum. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.