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What Last Night's Window into David Cameron's Real Life Can Tell Us About the Tory Leader

Did we get a behind-the-scenes look at the prime minister's day-to-day life, or another stage-managed grab for votes?

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Voters who enjoy probing interviews and believe that an election campaign should revolve around politicians rigorously defending their ideas might have been disappointed by Spotlight – David Cameron , which aired last night on ITV in England. In it, Tom Bradby, ITV News's political editor, spent time with Cameron in a number of domestic settings and talked to a few people close to him in order to show him in a more personal light.

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There was no snorting, grimacing Paxman here. What there was, though, was a chance to see how Cameron himself wants to be thought of. This was the kind of interview in which the pact is: I give you a little more private access than usual and, in return, you give me the chance to show the electorate who I really am.

What kind of character would emerge? Would the prime minister try to thrill us as the maverick ideologue on a mission or would he opt to play the calm and competent leader? Would he win us over with his easy charm, or reassure us by being as stern a father to his children as he is an adversary of Putin? Would any of it be more than just a vote-grabbing act? Over half an hour, five themes of Cameron emerged. Here's what those themes were.

CAMERON THE DECISION MAKER

If there's anything articles about the daily routines of high-powered CEOs have taught us, it's that the early bird catches the worm by efficiently answering the 247 administrative emails it needs to attend to before dawn. And so we met Cameron at 5:45 AM, already working away at a desk in his kitchen. It's from now until 7:45 AM that this presidential character can enjoy some "peace and quiet." After that, it's all cabinet meetings and Cobra.

He told us he had ten decisions to make that morning. He'd make them, and some of them would end up being the wrong ones. The line was repeated later in the program.

The message is clear: This is a man who can get up early. Also, this is a man who can make decisions. He can make decisions while other people are still boiling the kettle. Would Ed handle this kind of schedule, or would he be forever pressing the snooze button on his alarm? Could he even choose what to have for breakfast without panicking and spending the entire household budget on smoked salmon?

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DAVE THE FAMILY MAN

The three Cameron children gathered around the kitchen table for a morning chat in the way families do. Cameron is warm and personable, as demonstrated by his ability to eat an austere bowl of porridge with his children without thrashing them and carting them off to boarding school. Young Arthur Cameron was going to dress up as Robin Hood at school, and while a wholehearted embracing of this role would place him in direct conflict with his father, reporter Bradby left Oedipus out of it.

Instead, the voice-over asked how the PM moved from "matters of state to the school run," from "school lunches to Libya." The answer, of course, was: really, really smoothly, because Cameron is a decision-maker and that stretches into every area of his life.

The intersection of normal life and politics got awkward at times, though. Later in the show, while walking in the countryside, Cameron talked about his disabled son Ivan, who died just before his seventh birthday. Cameron's pain must be tremendous but here, the loss of his son is used to illustrate his hard-won wisdom and a sense of perspective. It's hard not to be cynical when the game requires the personal to be so completely laid bare to enhance the political. With Dave ostensibly at his most "real" it was in fact hard to tell to what extent he was being genuine.

DAVE THE NORMAL GUY

Because he's a family man, he's a normal guy—even if, as he admits, "I went to a very posh school… I had a very privileged background."

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There's no way of hiding this, so just admitting it is the sensible thing to do and quickly shift the focus from his privilege to the hard work and support of his parents. Most of the electorate may not be able to identify with going to a boarding school founded by a king in the middle ages, but they can identify with kids, marriage, and having parents you feel obliged to describe as "hard-working."

For most people this means something like your dad rushing out before you wake up to commute to a dreary 9-to-5 to keep food on the table. In Cameron's case, his dad was working hard to run a network of offshore investment funds in legal tax havens to preserve a $4 million family fortune. But hard work is hard work, whatever form it takes.

DAVE THE CHILLED BRO

A fixation with "Chillaxed Dave" ran through the program. Conservative Party co-chairman Lord Feldman, George Osborne, and William Hague all talked about how their leader was always the "calmest man in the room." Feldman pointed to his tennis-playing skills (Clegg is a "technically better" player but "makes more mistakes"), while Hague said that "the fact that he can relax is a great strength." And I guess it is comforting to know that the PM isn't going to fly of the handle in the Iranian embassy because someone took the last Ferrero Rocher.

An offshoot of the chill-bro image is Cameron's desire to be seen as cool. Just after he came to power, the Economist put an illustration of the prime minister with a Union Jack mohawk on its cover alongside the headline "Radical Britain: The West's most daring government." The paper distanced itself from the cover a couple of years later, but ITV's cameras caught it, still framed on Cameron's wall, like a post-Iraq Blair humming "Things Can Only Get Better" to himself, over and over again to keep the sounds of errant surgical strikes gone wrong out of his head.

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THE BLANK SLATE

In the end, the decision-making, presidential-style normal guy was stripped away and something more unsettling emerged: the blank slate. In a Q&A after the show aired, Bradby told me that Cameron "sometimes seems a little baffled by people seeing 'deep' motivations in him. It is true to say what you see is what you get."

A man who has no "deep motivations" sounds like a cypher. It's as if Bret Easton Ellis decided to give one of his characters an Etonian accent. In the program, Cameron is described as having "no strong beliefs about anything." Philip Collins, the Times columnist, acted as the program's one vaguely critical voice, suggesting that Cameron's suppleness is ultimately a weakness because no one really knows who he is.

That lack of conviction combined with a sort of Machiavellian political malleability comes across. He says that today's students and young people will be fine if they "make the right choices," which is an awesomely languid way to describe the insecurities he's talking about. Can he really believe it when he says that?

Being a shape-shifter adrift on a post-ideological sea is fine if you're some kind of Twitter satirist or Newsnight philosopher, but our politicians are meant to offer us a committed vision of what our society could be like. They're all struggling to do that right now. Last night David Cameron got the chance to tell his own story, but the yarn he spun was one underpinned by banality, entitlement, and a lack of urgency.

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