Liberty is the first casualty of the PR war Here's a game to play over dinner this Easter or Passover: take the story of the occasion and then retell it as it might be spun by David Cameron. The crucifixion? Of course we regret having to take this decision and Pontius Pilate, who is a very caring man, did his utmost to avoid it. But we cannot take chances in matters of public order and government is about making hard choices . . . The enslavement in Egypt? We do understand the aspirations of the children of Israel and were anxious to do our utmost to meet them as soon as the economic situation permitted. But it was quite wrong of them to retaliate in the way they did. The plague of locusts has caused a lot of hardship within the farming community . . . Matthew Engel Margaret Thatcher was sometimes said to be leader of the opposition to her own government. Britain's current prime minister, whose only non-political job was as a PR man to a television company, appears these days more like a press officer than a leader. Over the past two difficult weeks - another day, another policy disaster - he has kept popping up on the evening news, usually standing beside an elegant Downing Street fireplace, emolliently explaining away everything. He is awfully good at this. The past week, however, has brought an interesting change in direction. Next to the insistence on economic austerity, the central fact of the coalition government has been its commitment to civil liberties. Indeed, it was the main constituent of the glue that enabled two very different parties to start working together. The bond was formed in opposition during the years of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, when government policy on this issue was summed up by the Labour party chief whip (large, female, northern) to an anguished intellectual backbencher: "Bob, my constituents don't give a shit about civil liberties." And the coalition's first move was the abolition of Labour's scheme - dictatorial in theory, crackbrained in practice - for national identity cards. But in the past week, two proposed measures have galvanised the liberty lobby into anger: one is a plan to expand telephone surveillance so that the government will have access to everyone's email traffic; the other is the introduction of secret courts that could try terror suspects without revealing the identity of intelligence officers, or the nature of the charges to the defendants or their lawyers. The government has been in office almost two years. The wonder is that this change in direction has taken so long. For the Obama administration, the turning point came after just 11 months, with the arrest on Christmas day 2009 of the "underpants bomber" who tried, not very adeptly, to blow up a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. The White House position has only hardened since, as the political environment in Washington has grown ever more poisonous and the election drawn closer: one successful terrorist attack that could be blamed, however implausibly, on government policy would be the moment to say hello to President Romney. Barack Obama came in with two sacred, symbolic promises: the abolition of torture and the closure of Guantánamo Bay. The Bush administration's belief in the morality, constitutionality and (most bizarrely of all) efficacy of torture has indeed been abandoned. But Guantánamo not merely still stands, it was announced on Wednesday as the setting for the capital trial of the alleged 9/11 mastermind, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. Is this what the administration wanted? But ask any of the ex-idealists round the White House about the subject and you are likely to be greeted by a roll of the eyes, a shrug of the shoulders and a mutter of "welcome to Washington, buddy." In Britain the politics are more complex. There are tensions between the coalition parties and also within them. The extended surveillance and secret courts appear to have been urged on the government by senior figures in the security apparatus. On the courts, they are apparently being leant on by their US counterparts, threatening to withhold information unless Britain complies. Under Labour, the Metropolitan Police commissioner could have marched in to the home secretary's office with a plan to tattoo serial numbers on the forehead of everyone in Britain and received, at the very least, a kindly hearing. Well before 9/11, a theoretically left-of-centre government decided that no one would outflank it from the right on law and order. This was an entirely cynical calculation, as some ex-ministers now admit in private. And the thinking became understandably more entrenched in the years after the attacks. All countries wrestle with the security/liberty conundrum. It happens even in China and North Korea. But in democracies these issues are always tied to the electoral timetable. If Guantánamo is ever going to be demolished, it is certainly not going to happen between now and November. And there is always another November ahead. US governments used to snatch away people's rights in times of stress and hand some back in quieter times. Now the tide seems to go in only one direction. Britain could well be entering a phase in which the illiberal tide will start flowing more strongly again. So far the rhetoric remains unchanged: Ken Clarke, the justice secretary, insists that the secret courts are a way of making the security services more accountable. Tattooed serial numbers? If they ever come, be assured that Mr Cameron will be there, cooing sweetly: "Body art is very popular, and this is a service we will be providing free on the National Health Service. So this is a tremendous opportunity to extend the privilege to everyone.