David Cameron should have been in Pakistan yesterday but the trip was cancelled for “security reasons”. I am sure this is true and it had nothing to do with the fact that the Tories are imploding. Anyway, Pakistan’s loss is our gain. Yesterday we saw David Cameron, not in Rwanda or in Pakistan but in Westminster. It was just like old times.

I am going to try to not be too critical of Dave. Otherwise, he may accuse me of wanting a peerage. He did that on the radio yesterday about one of his critics, a chap called Ali Miraj. His name is pronounced “mirage”. This seemed the perfect way to describe the situation. Surely the “praise for peerages” scandal can only grow.

Dave had stayed in Westminster to make a speech on school discipline. The timing seemed a bit odd. The country is in holiday, not school, mode. My theory is that Dave is feeling under attack (not a mirage, by the way) and so he wanted to give a speech in which he could keep on repeating the word “discipline”. It was his S&M strategy (schools and management, since you ask, or perhaps survival and mirage).

Normally, the Tories are slick about everything, particularly presentation. But this time Dave actually spoke under a cloud. No, a real one. Well, OK, a picture of a real one. For reasons that remain inexplicable, the Tory party had changed its green tree logo into a blue-sky-with-cloud logo. So, yesterday, Dave found himself in Westminster, repeatedly saying the word “discipline” while under a cloud.

Still, it was a feisty performance aimed directly at his party’s malcontents. I knew he was serious when he began by extolling the virtues of Margaret Thatcher. For him, that is the nuclear option. Then, he told us about his family, something he often does when feeling vulnerable.

“Everything I am, I owe to my parents and my wider family,” he said. “To my mind the family is not merely a unit of society, it is the origin of society.”

It was hard not to see the whole thing as double-edged. Afterwards Dave took questions, almost none of which was about schools. What was his summer strategy? “The Conservative Party has an extremely clear and positive plan!” cried Dave. Can this be true? I saw the words “in denial” forming in the cloud.

“Mr Cameron, where is the greater need for discipline: in the school or in your party?” a journalist asked.

Dave tried to be upbeat. “I think we can look at what happened last week,” he said with pride. I tried to imagine what he could be talking about: surely not Rwanda, the polls, or the floods. No, instead, it was a meeting of the backbench Tory 1922 Committee which, he said, showed a great display of unity. “This party wants to be serious about government,” said Dave.

No one laughed because no one wanted to be accused of wanting peerages. Nor, by the way, is Dave bothered about those polls. “In terms of opinion polls, polls come, polls go. I’ve had big poll leads, small poll leads, poll deficits. What matters in politics is: are you answering the big question that the country is asking?”

Yes, I thought, this makes sense. I sat forward in my seat. Was Dave about to tell us whether there was a great white shark off the coast of Cornwall?

But Dave doesn’t think that is the big question. Instead he thinks it is this: “How can we mend our broken society?” But that, of course, may be a mirage.

Times Recommends

• UK regional accents thrive against the odds
• ‘Scarecrow’ wind farms put rare birds to flight
• What an anti-climax: G-spot is a myth