“A GREAT British take-off that leaves no one behind,” proclaimed David Cameron in the peroration of his speech to the Conservative Party conference on October 7th. This was his nod to “The Great British Bake Off”, an improbably popular televised baking contest whose final would be broadcast that evening. The slogan concluded a strikingly centrist address in which the prime minister encouraged his right-wing activists—the usual mix of prematurely balding young men and white-haired pensioners—to applaud international aid, gay marriage and Britain’s membership of the EU. They did not mind: this was the man whose popularity (as the only major leader to outpoll his party) had in May produced the first Tory majority for 23 years.

His success breaks several of the golden rules of politics. Mr Cameron’s five years as prime minister have been defined by deep cuts to the state, none of which clouded the sky when he became leader in 2005. New cuts to tax credits will leave low earners poorer, in spite of a higher minimum wage. The prime minister is haughtily upper-class—a distant cousin of the queen, no less—in a country where everyone used to hail the “classless society”. A new biography, “Call Me Dave”, alleges that as a member of a posh dining club at Oxford University Mr Cameron got up to some strange antics with a dead pig (a claim he denies). His popularity baffles foreigners: in a memo to Hillary Clinton in 2010 an adviser pooh-poohed the “aristocratic, narrowly Etonian” clique that would henceforth run Britain.

How, then, does Mr Cameron do it? Luck is one explanation. Rivals in his own party have variously bided their time, proven insubstantial or remained scrupulously loyal. Each Labour leader that he has faced—Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband, Jeremy Corbyn—has been less formidable than the previous one. Even UKIP, the right-populist party that once traumatised the prime minister, is now a mess. But something deeper is at work; something to do with the English soul. It helps to look at the Bake Off. Every week for the past two months millions of Britons have tuned in to watch a well-heeled octogenarian pull apart amateur chefs’ abilities while a couple of middle-aged women make smutty jokes about floury baps, soggy bottoms and sponge fingers. Matters like the ideal temperature at which to set a bavarois and the appropriate ratio of raisins to cherries in a fruit cake have gripped the nation.

To understand the success of the Bake Off is to understand that of Mr Cameron. The programme evokes an England of croquet pitches, high tea, rolling hills and squirely good manners. It takes place in a marquee outside a stately home in Berkshire, Welford Park, one village away from Peasemore, where the prime minister grew up. Union Jack bunting flutters in the breeze. Mary Berry, the programme’s matriarch, presides over proceedings just as the prime minister’s mother, a magistrate and pillar of the community, presided over Peasemore in his youth. Nonetheless, the setting also accommodates the Britain of 2015: of the three contestants to reach the final, two were non-white and one was gay; the winner wore a hijab as well as an apron. That this formula appeals to so many illustrates the strange mix of nostalgia, liberalism and tolerance of the old class system that defines today’s Britain. “Cameron’s privileged background only really counted against him among those already least inclined to vote Conservative,” note the authors of “Call Me Dave”. Uncomplicatedly proud of their past and relatively fond of their upper crust, Britons embrace continuity in a way that is hard to grasp when viewed from Washington, Berlin or Paris.

The Bake Off also reassures and soothes. It glazes a harsh world with its sweet blend of the silly, the inconsequential and the sturdily dull. Mr Cameron achieves the same effect through his unexotic demeanour. In his speech the prime minister portrayed Britain as “a beacon in an uncertain world”; a haven from violence and economic instability whose guarantor he claimed to be in the face of a “security-threatening, terrorist-sympathising” Labour leader. The contrast rings true to British voters. Throughout the last parliament, Mr Cameron was consistently deemed the party leader best qualified to be prime minister. Voters may doubt that he understands their lives, but they do think him capable of leadership. He is, according to the authors of “Cameron at 10”, another recently published biography, “the steadying presence”.

To each his just deserts

Thus the prime minister, like the Bake Off, belongs amid a great reversion in British culture to the twee and the gentle. Cath Kidston, a designer who revives 1950s patterns, now has 68 shops in Britain and Ireland (and about as many elsewhere). No middle-class British home is complete without a mug, fridge magnet or tea-towel proclaiming “Keep Calm And Carry On”, a slogan first revived from the war years by a Northumberland bookshop owner in 2000. Simple hobbies like knitting, pottery and dry-stone walling have all experienced resurgences; pastimes offering purity in an age of tumult and uncertainty.

This is relevant to the big debate that convulsed the conference in Manchester. Some in the Conservative Party consider their election victory a chance to veer off to the right. Mr Cameron opposed that in his speech—perhaps the best of his career—by seizing swathes of the moderate centre-ground. His rhetoric was superb: ranging across Britain’s responsibilities in the world, migrants’ contribution to the economy, the benefits of EU membership and the scourge of poverty. But it was no less than what the prime minister owed his voters, who had backed him not because they sought an ideological revolution, but because they preferred his mixture of stability, modernity and moderation over the alternatives. Britain’s reassuring prime minister has come up with a centrist policy mixture. Now he must bake it.