David Cameron's 'chumocracy" is no substitute for a political mission But to Cameron, politics is social. Taking Rebekah Brooks, then editor of the Sun, into his circle of friends was natural to him because this is how he has always operated. He grew up in a world where there was no clear divide between the personal and the political. Family connections took him into the Tory party in the first place and his mother-in-law introduced him to Carlton Communications. What some may see as nepotism, he will see as surrounding himself with competent people in whom he can absolutely trust. His modus operandi can dishearten those not in the loop. One prominent minister, a Cameron loyalist, complained to me recently that he'll never be promoted because he's not in the gang. "It's not a government, it's a chumocracy," he moaned. The Spectator once produced a diagram of where the power really lies in the Cameron government: a tangled web of old colleagues, old flames and Old Etonians. It is not exclusively the Cameron Club: there are people who wield real power in Whitehall who have never visited him in Oxfordshire. But not many. Of course, politics is a notoriously clannish business. The Blairites and Brownites warred for years, to their mutually assured destruction. Francis Pym famously complained that Thatcher would ask of her colleagues: "Is he one of us?" But she would have been referring to shared ideological beliefs, demanding that those in her inner circle were united in the same mission. It is impossible to imagine her inviting journalists for dinner without talking politics. To Cameron, "one of us" would mean something palpable, but something social. There is no visible ideological thread that binds Cameron's No 10 together. Even Labour spin in the mid-1990s projected more sense of mission. Gordon Brown would have drinks with journalists until the wee small hours, but would try to convert them to the merits of a minimum wage. This worked, and produced lots of pro-Labour journalists - but by force of argument, backed up by the dark arts of spin. In Edinburgh, Alex Salmond loves his dinners and drinks with journalists, and never tires of making the case for independence. In all the texts we have seen between Cameron and Brooks, there is a striking absence of anything resembling political argument. It seems he was just trying to make friends. This is not (yet) a crime. And New Labour, of course, courted the press with more vigour and paranoia than the Cameron operation has ever mustered - but it produced an agenda first and a spin strategy second. The Cameron project hasn't got this sequence quite right. It remains a weakness to this day. In the 2010 election, the country had turned away from Gordon Brown's government. But voters did not properly turn towards the Conservatives, for all their high opinion of the party's leader personally. It was as if there was something important missing from the Cameron project. This feeling persists. Mr Hilton was unfair to Mr Cameron's communications team. They are professional, honest and the very opposite of the venomous character assassins whom Brown notoriously employed. But they are not alchemists. You can't spin a growth strategy if one doesn't exist, nor rally media troops behind a wider cause that seems to have very little substance beyond the words "Big Society." Recruiting Mrs Brooks into a chumocracy was never going to be a substitute for an agenda that excites the nation. The Coalition does, of course, have radical policies. You can be an enthusiastic advocate of school and welfare reform, but even now Mr Cameron himself makes little mention of either. He is, in many ways, a post-ideological PM who used his superlative social networking skills a little more than he ought to have done. Politics is the art of making and winning arguments, and convincing journalists is an important part of the job. But this does not need to be done on horseback. The Prime Minister yesterday called for "a bit more distance" between politicians and the press. It is his lesson to learn. Fraser Nelson is editor of 'The Spectator