Leader: Time for Cameron to stand up and be counted Another week, another UK government relaunch by the Prime Minister. Such has been the difficulty David Cameron has had in establishing his grip on the government, his party and the coalition, it has become hard to distinguish between fact and fiction, between the real Westminster administration and the one we see on television in The Thick Of It. Yesterday, Mr Cameron was again facing charges of presiding over an "omnishambles" - a word which was created for ferocious but (let us not forget) fictitious spin-doctor Malcolm Tucker in Armando Iannucci's mockumentary - as he tried to present the government as having a tough new approach on law and order south of the Border, and reported back to the Commons on a European summit where he, once again, found himself at odds with most of the senior EU leaders. For a man who, along with his close friend and political ally George Osborne, more or less publicly admitted an admiration for the way Labour under Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell ran the government, and mercilessly mocked the chaos that ensued when Gordon Brown took over, the predicament the Prime Minister finds himself in must be frustrating in the extreme. Yet, while all governments are at the mercy of events, the conduct of Mr Cameron's administration has been if not omnishambolic, certainly shambolic. From the ill-conceived Budget that resulted in numerous U-turns, through to the handling of Andrew Mitchell's efforts to keep his job as chief whip to the half-baked idea on utility charges, the Prime Minister appears to be in office but not in power, staggering from one hastily cobbled-together initiative to another, with no clear sense of a strategy. First, there is a sense that Mr Cameron wanted to be Prime Minister but had little idea what to do once he had achieved high office. Into this policy-lite, ideological vacuum stepped the Right of his party to cause trouble on, among other issues, membership of the European Union and the existence of the coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Given this, it is ironic that, despite the difficulties and policy differences, it seems the Prime Minister is better at managing the relationship with Lib Dems - something he put his personal authority behind when he failed to win an outright majority in the UK election - than he is at managing relations with a large section of his own party. In his defence, Mr Cameron and his supporters would point to the fact they took power in the wake of the great banking crash and were faced with the Herculean task of repairing the deeply-damaged economy bequeathed to them by Labour. There is more than a grain of truth in this, but there comes a time when governments have to stop blaming their predecessors and take responsibility themselves. That time has come for Mr Cameron. The country needs to know what, if anything, he stands for.