What kind of Conservative government is David Cameron actually leading now? It says something about the blurriness of our second-term prime minister that, even after nearly a decade leading his party, answers to this question still vary so radically. Yet there is no more interesting or more important question in the new era of British politics.

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Cameron says, almost ad nauseam these days, that this will be a “one-nation government”. He opened the Queen’s speech debate last week offering a programme “for working people from a one-nation government who will bring our country together”. These phrases are in grave danger of becoming meaningless. But it would be a mistake to assume for that reason that they are simply a lie.

Nevertheless, Labour has already slipped back into that assumption. Shadow minister Angela Eagle described the Queen’s speech last week as “a wolf in sheep’s clothing … a legislative programme couched in fluffy soundbites, barely disguising a triumphalist Thatcherite agenda”. A lot of people on the left will doubtless want to believe this is true.

But it isn’t so simple. The danger for too many is that they see only what they want to see. As a result they may miss the less bloodcurdling picture which those who are not so inclined to tribalism may be seeing. For all of us, the challenge is to look at the whole picture and try to take an objective view. The Tories won the 7 May election for a lot of different reasons, some positive, some negative. The critics have not even started to get their minds round most of them.

Take the hugely important issue of the health service. Labour still insists that it sees a government set on privatising the NHS. But they are simply wrong. Jeremy Hunt is essentially managing what he has inherited. He is not making the mistakes that his predecessor, Andrew Lansley, made. But that’s about all. There is no radical reform plan from the government. The NHS will still be very recognisably there in 2020 at the next election, better in some ways, worse in others, but still generally venerated.

It might be better if all of us started from the assumption that Cameron means what he says, rather than meaning something else, let alone the very opposite. Cameron’s one-nation talk may be a bit banal, but it is the non-Thatcherite language with which he is most comfortable. When he says he wants the economy to work for everyone, or to bring people together, cut him some slack and allow that he means it. On balance that’s good not bad. Get over it.

Part of the problem of trying to understand him is that he does not impose as leader. He is a halfhearted party manager

But what does it mean once you dig deeper? Cameron may now talk the language of good sense and common ground, but as head of the coalition he was not been a conspicuously reforming prime minister and he will get knocked off balance again at some point, as he did when Ukip began its rise. His leadership has lacked an over-arching story, never mind something grander like a moral mission. Even the long term economic plan was only long term or a plan in retrospect.

Now though, he has a majority and a term limit. He will be gone well before 2020. No 10 is manifestly more important already in the power structure of the new government than it was in the coalition, when the “quad” had to sign off on everything. Cameron is much more firmly in the driving seat. But where is he driving? It still is not clear, but maybe that’s no sin.

Part of the problem of trying to understand Cameron is that he does not impose as leader. He is a halfhearted party manager. As a result, even now, he tends to hold a loose rein. His all-Tory government is itself a coalition, as they always are. But since it stretches from a very Hayekian libertarian, like the new business secretary, Sajid Javid, with his admiration for Ayn Rand, to a more traditionally social liberal like the education secretary, Nicky Morgan, it is all too easy for observers to pick and choose the piece of evidence that suits a predetermined case but misses the messier big picture.

A second part of the problem is that the government has landed itself with commitments it never expected to have to carry out and which it knows will be unpopular. The completion of the Royal Mail sell-off announced by George Osborne today is a classic example. The extension of the right-to-buy to housing association tenants, in many ways an act of theft by the state, is another. It is hobbled further by Osborne’s taste (inherited from Gordon Brown) for laws that are designed primarily to embarrass Labour; examples here include the absurd “tax lock” bill (which Osborne sounded as if he regretted yesterday and the tightening of strike ballot rules.

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But there is also a tendency to too much throat-clearing in many of the government’s pronouncements. Cameron is clearly more comfortable not imposing – and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that approach to being a PM. Clement Attlee ran his government that way, and left institutions like the NHS, revered to this day. But Cameron still evades classification a lot of the time. He is manifestly right wing in many of his stances, like the Human Rights Act, but he is equally manifestly progressive in others, like gay marriage and the aid budget. It’s not the worst mix, judging by the result of the election if nothing else. But it often feels like a collection of stances rather than anything that could be talked up as Cameron-ism.

This government will be remembered for the way it handles three issues: Europe, the (UK) union and public spending. All three are to some extent problems of the Tory party’s own creation, all made more difficult and dangerous as a result of decisions for which Cameron must take responsibility. On the first two, however, Cameron’s position – for staying in the EU and in favour of devolution to strengthen the union – is not just popular but right. On the last, government austerity spending to see off the fiscal deficit, his policy has just been upheld, sort of, at the election.

Britain did not vote for radical change of either the left or the right in May. Some of the things Cameron has done and said since the election could lead him and his party into the mire. Much of it seems quite well judged – and even worth thinking about. Whether it adds up to more than the sum of its parts still remains doubtful. But it’s all still to play for and to study. There is a bit more to it than soundbites and wickedness.