How Cameron woos the voters

There is good profile of David Cameron in the New York Times.  It starts off with a revealing insight on how Cameron relates in a self-deprecating way to people he meets:

David Cameron was on his way from London to Croydon in a second-class train car last October when a middle-aged man across the aisle interrupted him and started telling an obscene joke. Cameron, the 42-year-old leader of Britain’s Conservatives, had been discussing his first clear political memory — the May 1979 trial of the head of the Liberal Party, Jeremy Thorpe, a closeted homosexual, for conspiring with a nightclub owner to murder his sometime lover, Norman Scott.  The eavesdropper across the aisle said with a smirk that he would vote for Cameron if Cameron could tell him how you fit four Liberals on a bar stool.

“No, no, no, don’t go there,” Cameron says politely. “Don’t go there. This is a family train.”

But the guy has worked up a head of steam. “You remember it?” he asks.

“I know what the answer is, put it like that.”

That apparently does the trick. “Ah, well, you can get my vote then.”

“That’s one,” Cameron tells him. “Eleven million to go.”

Could you imagine Brown having a conversation like that with anyone?