After shock and awe, Cameron needs a narrative

David Cameron is in danger of turning into a Heathite. This is nothing to do with policies; it is about politics. One of Edward Heath’s favourite slogans was “action, not words”. The new prime minister also seems to think that actions will speak for themselves. If so, he is wrong. Words are to politics what oil is to a car engine. Without them, everything seizes up. Only through words can a politician maintain his momentum.

After the first 100 days of the Cameron administration, that might seem a curious claim. Whatever may have been lacking, it is not momentum. But the government has had one great advantage. The pace of change has taken most people’s breath away. This will not last. Come the autumn, the government will not be able to persuade people merely by taking them aback. It will have to explain itself.

“But we have,” the Cameroons will insist, reeling out a long list of speeches. They are already suffering from a classic politician’s illusion: the belief that when you say something, people will listen. Not necessarily so: in politics, it can take a remarkable amount of repetition to capture an audience. Mr Cameron’s failure to do so thus far is easily proved. Next time you are at a dinner party, ask the table about the prime minister’s core beliefs. That should ensure a lively debate. Some will insist that he is just a mushy wimp; others, that he is Margaret Thatcher in an Old Etonian tie. There will be no risk of a consensus; people do not yet know the answer.

That is because Mr Cameron has not yet explained himself. His views are an interesting blend: small-c conservatism plus economic and social liberalism. The strands come together in his conviction that the state must be rolled back, because it is stifling society. By “society”, he means a fusion of individual responsibility and civic virtue: the myriad little platoons which have been menaced by Whitehall’s great clunking fist.

It is not easy to find the right language to express this; it never is, when a politician is challenging an entrenched orthodoxy. Lady Thatcher had similar problems in her early years. Think of “privatisation”: a more emollient expression could surely have been found. Or “monetarism”, which made attempts to practise common-sense economics sound like an academic seminar controlled by strange and sinister ideologues.

Now, when Mr Cameron talks about “responsibility”, he can sound like an old-fashioned housemaster deploring the lack of house spirit – and no one knows what he means by “big society”. The “big” makes it sound threatening, when in reality, big society is only the equivalent of a collective noun for little platoons. These are all benign concepts, but the public will not understand that until they are properly expressed.

There is one reason for the Cameroons’ reluctance to provide such an explanation. They inherited an intellectual vacuum from Lady Thatcher. Thatcherism did not have a theory of the state. She never tried to go back to first principles and ask the basic questions: what is the proper role of the state? If we were setting up a British government tomorrow, ex nihilo, what powers should it have; what should it own, what should it control? Lady Thatcher often gave the impression that she regarded the state as an un-privatisable residuum, infested by pen-pushers and jobsworths. That was a caricature, but she was largely to blame for its potency, and for the resulting four-letter “c” word that blighted her successors’ prospects: cuts.

That leads us to a piquant paradox. When Mr Cameron became Tory leader, he was determined to move to a post-cuts politics, so that it would never again be possible to accuse the Tories of visceral hostility to the important public services. Oliver Letwin, one of the more important intellects in the Cameron entourage, always insisted that the Tories would have to win widespread trust in order to earn the right to be radical. Yet Mr Cameron is now setting out to be the prime minister who cuts on an unprecedented scale. In political terms, this will only work if he can convince the voters that even with severe fiscal restraint, structural reforms can deliver better public services.

Although that is not an easy message to convey, the government will have to find the right words. There will soon be a new inmate in 10 Downing St: a lusty, bawling infant. Mr Cameron and his ministers should follow her example and give tongue.

The writer is a political commentator