DAVID Cameron is perfectly suited to being Prime Minister. He handles the job with aplomb and seems at ease in his skin, which is not something you could say about Gordon Brown. So will this column now have to eat its hostile words?

Well, no. Word-pie remains off the menu.

You see, there is something troubling about this coalition Government. Smiles all round on the smooth surface, with Mr Cameron and co-conspirator/sidekick Nick Clegg beaming congenially while delivering platitudes dusted with sugar, just to take away the foul medicinal tang.

But within this new political idyll, in which tub-thumping and posturing were said to be a thing of the past, something unpleasant seems to be stirring.

It started, as all good horror stories should, with a creaking door. This led down to the cellar where the Labour Government had kept all its scary secrets about the economy, at least if you believe everything Mr Cameron and his Chancellor, George ‘Hammer’ Osborne, have to say on the matter.

The Tory-led administration and its Lib-Dem partners seem to protest too much, to enjoy inflicting cuts and financial pain, basically to get off on telling us how tough it’s got to be. That is why they let the mangy pecuniary beasts out of their cages and set them free to scare the public and bite a few ankles.

Pinkly stretched skin besides, I can’t help feeling that something dark lurks inside Mr Cameron. He is not, it is tempting to conclude, half as nice as he pretends to be, and could turn out to be more extreme than dear old Mrs Thatcher.

New Governments do tend to charge about the place a bit, much like the owner of a new house who starts knocking down walls the minute they have moved in, certain in the knowledge that whoever built the place simply had no idea what they were doing.

This tendency is apparent in the Prime Minister himself, with his barely coherent sermons about the ‘big society’ – a notion as unclear now as it was during the election. He was at it again this week, and it was no easier to understand his point.

This flabby notion depends too much on stirring up antipathy towards so-called big government, as if all of our problems were caused by the state.

You could, in the wake of the banking crisis, just as easily say that big business or big capitalism raises as many difficulties.

More worrying still is the haste with which the coalition is tearing into education and the National Health Service, while also glowering at the BBC. Houses of horror the lot of them, or so the Government seems to suggest, whose walls need to be pulled down right now.

The unseemly rush to push through legislation making way for even more academy schools is matched only by the reforms being pursued by Health Secretary Andrew Lansley.

Most people’s experience of the NHS remains a positive one, as the letters page of this newspaper often attests.

In general, the British public appreciates the NHS and has some pride in the system, while accepting that matters could sometimes be arranged better.

This does not, however, amount to a ringing call for everything to be ripped up in a mad ideological sprint. Mr Lansley’s plans amount to major and brutal surgery for the NHS – something his boss failed to mention in any of those TV election debates, or anywhere else come to that.

As for the cobbled-together plan that GPs should more or less run the NHS, is this really a good idea? Have they even asked the GPs? Who will ensure standards across all services?

To all of which the only answer remains an upwards movement of the shoulders.

This double-headed Government seems oddly intent on selling us progress, while creating the possibility of chaos and, in all probability, even greater inefficiency.

So no word sandwich for me just yet.