Phone hacking has shown David Cameron to be off the pace

The moment, only 10 days ago , that the Guardian revealed that the News of the World had hacked Milly Dowler's phone, David Cameron's political character became one of the central issues in politics. The more he has failed to convey an understanding of the scale of the political earthquake, the more pivotal he has become in a story that he once hoped to dismiss as the work of lefty obsessives. Forced to justify decisions he had made and the company he kept even as the cultural icons of the Murdoch years toppled around him, how the prime minister has conducted himself may come to be his lasting measure. If so, he has much work to do. Cameron has revealed at the least an unexpected lack of imagination, at worst a stubborn refusal to confront reality. Slow to grasp how the hacking scandal was likely to unravel, he has seemed not only leaden-footed but – unlike the Labour leader Ed Miliband – unable to retreat to first principles. There are plenty of critics on the right as well as the left who will be pleased to hint that is because he does not know where to locate them. Cameron already has problems. He is perceived as a man who calibrates his decisions according to the day's headlines, a man who likes to be liked, and who doesn't mind protecting himself by blaming his ministers. The past 10 days of unsparing assault on his whole political culture won't have done much to change people's minds about that. It would be wrong to underestimate the magnitude of the political shift that is taking place. For all the difficulties Cameron left behind when he set off for Afghanistan just less than a fortnight ago, there were still some eternal truths in Westminster culture of which the two most significant were the importance of Rupert Murdoch and the narrowness of the political elite in which he was often the arbiter. The public wants imagination, clarity and courage to meet new circumstances. But no British political leader's world has worked like that since News International first challenged the Daily Mail as the newspaper group that set the political weather back in the early 90s. The seminal event in the politics of the past quarter century was the Sun destroying Neil Kinnock in the late 1980s. A year or two later, Cameron was getting his first job as Norman Lamont's special adviser. The prime minister's whole political career has been shaped in an environment where No 10's waking thought has been how to keep in with the media. His method of achieving success is writ large in the damage it is causing as this culture expires, quite possibly bringing down with it his political reputation, too. To make things even more difficult for Cameron, each day has brought a series of unexpected developments as the Murdoch team try to regain control of the game. Wednesday afternoon's decision to drop the BSkyB bid , a triumph for media pluralism at least for a little while, was just the latest bit of eye-catching crisis management that has left Cameron looking off the pace. Meanwhile, the more News International fights to control the agenda, the more important it is that Cameron stands apart. But it was only during prime minister's questions , when he called for the News International management to concentrate on mucking out their past mess rather than constructing new mergers, that he finally achieved disengagement. And much of the good that move did was undone by his decision to back away from taking part in the debate on the commercial implications of the hacking crisis. Downing Street said he would already have said all he had to say. Maybe. But there is symbolism in these things, and the Cameron no-show looks suspiciously like an attempt to avoid flattering the prestige Miliband has earned by being exactly as imaginative and certain as Cameron has not. And it leaves his determination of only two days ago to be part of a bid to take back parliament look more a matter of calculation than conviction.