Cameron on Cameron covers a year of “conversations” between the smooth-talking Tory leader and Dylan Jones, the former fashion journalist, now editor of GQ, the men's mag. The conversations took place in various campaign-trail cars, at Tory HQ, in Blackpool bars, in Cameron's “typically middle-class” kitchen, but they could just as well have been played out in a men-only sauna, Jones gently cupping Cameron as they exchange sweet nothings.

“David, having just witnessed the stampede out there...and the way you were set up, my first question is a fairly obvious one ...Yes, you get enormous acclaim and satisfaction from your role, but why on earth would you do it?”

[If you'll just stop nibbling my ear lobe for a second, Dylan dear, I'll tell you.] “Was there anything about your childhood that you had to overcome?”

[Oooooh, that's the spot, Dylan. Right there. Not so hard.] “Tell us a piece of wisdom to live by.”

[Yes, yes, yes.] “How often do you tell Samantha you love her?”

[Why do you always have to bring her up when we're together?]

In case you care, the most challenging thing Cameron had to overcome as a child wasn't, as you would imagine, being torn from his family and packed off to boarding school. It was living in his older brother's shadow. And he tells Samantha he loves her “quite often actually. We have a very intimate banter with each other”. Shudder.

In the preface (“Welcome to the Book of Dave”), Jones claims grandly that he aims to convince the reader one way or the other on Cameron. With a whole year of access and a whole 352 pages of print, you might reasonably expect to find out some interesting facts, some behind-the-scenes, inside-the- machine titbits. The closest we come to that is a moment when Cameron drops his guard, ranting briefly about his speech notes. “I don't like the type justified as it makes it incredibly difficult to read...bloody hell, does anybody actually read this stuff before it's given to me?”

[Calm down, David. Come and have a rub.] Oh, and the shock revelation that he almost came a cropper when a White Van Man tried to shove our heroic cyclist into the path of an oncoming vehicle. “Luckily I managed to put the brakes on. He gave me a hell of a shock.” Lucky indeed.

There are some mildly entertaining passages on how he made a deal with his wife before he went for the leadership (home two nights a week and most of the weekend or else), very occasional humour (“If you listen to the Today programme too much, you want to call the Samaritans”) and some sense of the great demands of raising their severely disabled son Ivan.

But the rest focuses on Cameron's vision. We must plough through long passages on prison reform, taxation, immigration, education, all fluffed by Jones's soft interrogation and random lifestyle questions. (“Do you believe in God? Yes, I do. I don't have a personal direct line, and he's not on my mobile or BlackBerry.”) It is a party political broadcast allowed to run at the same length as a politician's ego.

Is this the fault of Jones or Cameron? Well, Jones wrote it. He asked the primary-school questions (“What's your greatest fear? What did you last cook? What word best sums up the Conservative party in 2008?”). He pads out the conversations with his partisan analysis and general frottage such as the breathless analysis of Brown v Cameron at PMQs: “It is like you are two breastplated sportsmen, battling it out...you look like you enjoy playing with him as though you were a cat and he was a mouse.”

Cameron or one of his flock of press assistants must have read it, though. Did nobody tell them that coming off badly in a robust interview is not half as bad as coming off badly in lots of unrobust ones? He says he doesn't think the British people can be hoodwinked by cynical Labour policy. So does he think they can be won over by this sort of cynical propaganda?

Is there anything to be learnt from this collection of sound-bites? Well, yes. You start to get a sense of how he does it. Like Tony Blair, he is masterful at giving the impression of rolling up the shirt sleeves, banging heads together, and getting on with it. He goes to a prison and asks the big questions, Jones scurrying behind him. He says he won't let the legacy of Enoch Powell make him shrink from the tough decisions needed on immigration. He won't avoid talking about the importance of family just because he might be labelled a reactionary. By saying these things, he makes himself sound like he's a no-nonsense reformer. Like he's going to fix broken-down Britain. But because his technique is so formulaic, it isn't convincing. Not remotely. You just don't buy it.

A more rigorous working through his manifesto might have exposed its weaknesses. Or possibly its strengths. All Cameron on Cameron shows is two men indulging their forbidden love, Jones for Cameron and Cameron for himself.

Cameron on Cameron: Conversations with Dylan Jones
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