The riots are David Cameron's biggest test yet

Under pressure: The PM gives a press conference outside 10 Downing Street yesterday morning
12 April 2012

When Parliament meets in emergency session tomorrow, it will conduct two snap audits, interlinked but separate: first, of the nation's social fabric and, second, of David Cameron's premiership. This is the greatest test to date of the PM's mettle and of his statesmanship.

Political legend has it that a child once pointed at Lord Randolph Churchill and asked: "Mama, what is that man for?" A Prime Minister who cannot preserve the social order faces similar questions, and rightly so. Cameron did himself no favours by failing to come home until yesterday. The public was left with the impression that his return was forced rather than instinctive; that it was the consequence of political calculation rather than of reflexive empathy with the nation's anxieties.

His dithering and delay over the weekend left the televisual field open to the rioters. On Monday evening in particular the stage was left clear for the rioters, their moment of vile celebrity on our television screens ensured by the absence of any serious competition from the political class. Hackney, Croydon, Ealing: the images of conflagration were more or less uninterrupted, a sort of open-mike night for the thuggish to do their worst on national television.

At a subliminal level, Cameron was also subverting the basis upon which his Coalition came into being. Fear of disorder, as I have written before, was the midwife to its formation. In those nervous days after the general election it was the scenes of rioting in Athens, as the mob protested over the Greek financial crisis, that focused the inter-party talks in Whitehall and impressed upon politicians and senior civil servants alike the urgent need to secure a deal as quickly as possible, to calm market neurosis and - above all - to establish unambiguously who was in charge. If that was clear to Cameron in May 2010 - and it was - why did it take him so long to perceive the much sharper dangers in August 2011?

In his brilliant history of London, Peter Ackroyd notes that "the curious and persistent feature of London life is that 'law and order' has never collapsed and that civic peace has been maintained even in the face of grave disorder Its mobs have never yet dominated it". That is true - so far - but will be scant comfort to those outside the capital in West Bromwich, Wolverhampton and Manchester sifting through the debris of last night's mayhem.

The deployment of 16,000 police officers on London's streets made a significant difference but this disorderly virus is both mobile and mutating fast. It has already moved on to infect other cities - cities whose immune systems are much less robust than London's. The social contagion spreads and those charged with containing it face an unenviable task.

But contain it they must. Predictably, the first four nights of disorder have triggered a rhetorical riot of analysis and over-analysis, an intellectual glamorisation of young men stealing plasma screens and trainers. The Left has stormed in with a wearyingly familiar narrative involving spending cuts, tuition fees, the abolition of the education maintenance allowance, closed youth clubs and (what they really mean) the presence of a Tory in No 10. To see this at its slippery worst go to iPlayer and watch the angry exchange between Michael Gove and Harriet Harman on last night's Newsnight. Labour's deputy leader notionally condemned the riots, while insinuating - disgracefully - that the mayhem is somehow connected with the Coalition's policies.

Yet many on the Right have also defrosted their favourite analyses in the microwave much too quickly, alluding instantly to the terrible impact of welfare dependency, family breakdown and the inability of inner-city schools to help the "underclass''. These are indeed dreadful social pathologies, many of them first explored in Losing Ground (1984), the pioneering study by the US political scientist Charles Murray. But I do not share the certainty of some on the Right that what we are seeing on Britain's streets can be neatly explained with reference to such analyses. Indeed, I see little political or sociological content of any kind - only a violent consumerism, in which the only right being fought for is the right to free trainers.

There was a time when English mobs fought for "Church and king". Now they smash windows for "Adidas and Nike".

For guidance I would turn not to Marx or to Murray, but to Thomas Hobbes. This much-misunderstood political philosopher was not a defender of authoritarianism for its own sake but understood that "commodious living" depended upon the preservation of basic order. For Hobbes, the alternative was a "state of nature" in which life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". Only a "common power" could prevent the war "of every man against every man".

What we are seeing on the streets of Britain this week is a sporadic glimpse of the Hobbesian state of nature - localised and digitised for 21st-century consumption. These are Riots 2.0 - broadcast in real time on Twitter, organised on BlackBerrys, agile and nimble to an extent that would have been unthinkable in the Eighties.

The first and most basic task of any government is to keep the peace; to protect those it serves from the passions, frustrations and caprice of their fellow citizens. One man's legitimate grievance is another's unjustified whinge: the state, enacting the law, preserves a modus vivendi so that conflicts of interests, unsatisfied demands and sheer anger do not lead to social breakdown. And that is all that counts right now. Until order is restored, all else is distraction. Until the shops stop being boarded up at 3pm, all analysis is pointless. Until the fires are doused, the public will look at Cameron and ask: "What is that man for?" So, Prime Minister: what is your answer?

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