Why David Cameron Will Be Britain's Next PM

Temperament trumps class, Michael Wolff writes in explanation of why David Cameron, a Conservative aristocrat who should be anathema to recession-flattened Brits, is in fact about to beat the pants off of Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Cameron, who worked in PR for 7 years, has managed to reinvent himself into the perfect foil for Brown, "whose lack of ease, personal remoteness, and instinctive doctrinaireness make him seem, compared with the unflappable Cameron, dark and flawed—a political train wreck."

Labour's efforts to "paint Cameron as a foolish toff" haven't stuck; they've only made the party seem hopelessly flat-footed for playing the class card. With political plasticity and brilliant marketing, Cameron has manged to detoxify the Tories, and, as London Mayor Boris Johnson tells Wolff in the Vanity Fair profile, he's “alchemized a position of more or less glutinous consensus”—something that conspicuously eludes Americans leaders at the moment.



(More David Cameron stories.)