I realise I have probably lost most of you at the headline there, but hear me out.
Last week David Cameron talked about the need for responsible capitalism. A lot of people are saying he's nicked the idea off Ed Miliband. But to be fair to Cameron (did I really just write 'to be fair to Cameron'? I did) he was saying this kind of stuff when Ed Miliband was still in short trousers, although he may have been playing football at the time.
I'm not saying this is a left-wing government, although there's more than a whiff of Mao Tse Tung about Iain Duncan Smith and his great benefit leap backwards. Back in the day when Conservatives changed their leader more often than their duck moats, I think Iain Duncan Smith may have spent a few minutes as Leader of the Opposition. I may be wrong - I'll google it later. Anyway his unique selling point at the time was that he was 'the quiet man'. Only now, when quiet men are all the vogue and people are flocking to see The Artist, Iain Duncan Smith is refusing to bloody well shut up.
Like many old lefties, I spent most of the '80s wondering if Labour would ever win power again, most of the '90s worrying what Labour would do if they ever won power again, and most of the noughties whingeing about Labour being in power again. I gradually came to accept the mantra that socialism was dead because, well, everybody was saying it. And it was true, wasn't it?
I'd never been a left-wing firebrand, more a soft left box of Swan Vestas, but even by my own wishy-washy namby-pamby pinko standards I was starting to wonder if, in comparison to the Blair cabinet, I was turning into Karl Marx.
Then along came David Cameron, a politician who started to talk about things I believed in. A staunch environmentalist, he argued it was no longer feasible for us to carry on flying, driving, heating our homes and destroying the planet - and individuals taking action was not enough on its own. Governments had to intervene, sign up for Kyoto, and more, and we all had to take responsibilty.
In 2009, during one of Dave's annual jaunts to Davos, he said "So now we are forced to re-consider the old economic orthodoxy. To question its assumptions about monetary policy; its rules on fiscal policy, and its faith in the virtue of free-market capitalism." He may only have been saying these things to wind up Norman Tebbit, but he then added "people know that the roots of our current problems lie in recklessness and greed."
And how about this corker: "Today, the poorest half of the world's population own less than one per cent of the world's wealth." Remember where you heard that first, Occupy - from David William Donald Cameron.
There was a very good reason why David Cameron stopped making such intelligent and thought-provoking speeches. He worked out, as I did from listening to him, that if you took his arguments to their logical end, what he was advocating was an end to economic growth as a goal in itself, and a massive international re-distribution of wealth, from each country according to their means, to each according to their needs. For the first time in years, he made me believe in socialism again.
Cameron's radicalism has, unsurprisingly, dimmed with each step he has taken closer to power. Remember he's not there yet, let's not forget that he remains the leader of a coalition, not an elected prime minister with a majority. He certainly seems to forget it regularly.
But even as he waters down each idea, important ones remain. At one point in his speech about responsible capitalism, he said "While of course there is a role for government, for regulation and intervention, the real solution is more enterprise, competition and innovation." Okay it's modest, and it's not exactly health & safety gone mad, but whichever way you look at it, he is arguing in favour of 'red tape.'
Cameron's 'of course' in that speech is a direct challenge to most of his MPs, for whom red tape is the equivalent of Jacques Delors handing out free lager to the unemployed, paid for by the British contribution to the EU. Never mind Malvinas, these are the same people who would have him send a task force to Strasbourg in order to allow every Englishman the chance to hack into your phone and take your child into care.
Intelligent speeches as Leader of the Opposition are one thing, and Cameron's are clearly not worth the Samantha Cameron Smythson stationery they're scrawled on. But these days he is quite possibly as near as he will ever be to being in a position to do something. For now, just this once, I'm backing him.