Queen's Speech: David Cameron's social reforms are right – but his party will never love him for them

Traditionally-minded Conservatives packed into the House of Lords for the Queen’s Speech today could be forgiven for thinking they are in the wrong room, or perhaps the wrong decade. A “social reform” agenda of modernised prisons, help for children in care, measures to get more poor and non-white children into top universities, and some earnest-sounding

stuff about mental health? To some Tories, it will sound like a programme the last Labour government could have conceived.

It is certainly not what they hoped for when David Cameron delivered that Conservative majority last year.  Mr Cameron claimed during the Coalition years that he, too, yearned to do proper Tory things, if only he could free himself from Liberal Democrat constraints: he told his MPs he kept a “little black book” of true-blue policies he dreamt of implementing in a second term. Few on the Right who heard that expected his book to contain the sort of policies that will be announced today.

That’s one reason the Conservative family’s response to Mr Cameron’s social reform plans has been lukewarm at best. Many regard the Prime Minister’s talk of helping people “left behind” by economic and social progress as his self-indulgent hobby, or perhaps a bid to be remembered as a leader with a vision, not just a competent manager.

Dismissing the Cameron agenda as a mere vanity project would be wrong, though. It’s more interesting than that.

Most immediately, it could make a small but significant difference to the EU referendum. The result will in large part hang on the willingness of Left-leaning younger voters to turn out and vote alongside Mr Cameron to Remain. But Mr Cameron will get no help on that from the Labour leadership – indeed, some Labour interventions on Europe, such as John McDonnell’s speech yesterday, raise the suspicion that Jeremy Corbyn and friends are actually trying to sabotage the Remain campaign. So the Prime Minister has taken on the job of wooing such voters himself. He’s made common cause with trade union leaders and watered down a trade union reform law . He’s written for the Daily Mirror, a paper that previously told its readers he was starving benefits claimants to death by curbing welfare spending.

A legislative agenda dedicated to helping vulnerable and “hard to reach” groups will not persuade angry Corbynites to join Mr Cameron’s Remain campaign, but it might just persuade a few wavering Left-wingers that not everything the Conservative leader wants is wicked.

There’s a better reason than tactics for the social reform agenda, though: conviction. Politics is too much about what’s expedient and convenient, not enough about beliefs and ideas. Mr Cameron has done more than his fair share of expedient, pragmatic politics (the referendum is a prime example: he didn’t want it and doesn’t really care much about Europe, but felt he had to keep his party happy) so it’s only right that his final years as PM are spent trying to do things he really believes in. And if he believes anything deeply, it’s that some of the privilege he was born to and the opportunities it gave him should be shared with others. His post-election promise of a One Nation government came from the heart and his best days as party leader and prime minister have come when that heart overcomes a head that inclines to short-term compromise and managerial fudge.

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