There was something very odd about David Cameron going all the way to Cyprus to talk about Westminster. That is Cyprus not as in the island but as in the DLR station at the fag end of the Beckton branch. Still, this is the wild, wild east of London and E16 is a world away from SW1. As one inhabitant of the Westminster Village said: “I feel like I need my passport to come here.”

That says more about Westminster than Cyprus, of course, as so much did yesterday. An anthropologist would have loved this event, which began with Dave, coatless, striding along the waterfront at the University of East London in temperatures just above freezing. Film crews scrambled backwards to catch his every step. Behind him, a small aircraft took off from London City airport and I could almost hear passengers saying: “Look, there’s an ant down there without a coat, he must be mad.”

A warm little nest had been made for Dave in the Students’ Union. It would have made sense for him to speak on higher education or something similar, but that would be too logical. So instead, and without apology, Dave launched into a speech on “rebuilding trust in politics”. As he said this, distrust grew in the room. It was a detailed diatribe against Gordon Brown and the ways of Westminster delivered in fluent political-ese, a dialect spoken only by inhabitants of SW1 and its media diaspora.

Perhaps this is why the students behind Dave looked as if they were fighting to stay alive. Dave kept saying: “We are a new generation.” No, I thought, they are the new generation. Only at Westminster is the age of 43 (Dave’s age) considered young.

Gordon is an ever-growing roadblock to reform, he said. I imagined Gordon surrounded by orange cones.

“He can’t reform the institution because he IS the institution,” said Dave. I tried to imagine Gordon as an institution, undoubtedly housed in a giant grey stone Scottish castle, surrounded by orange cones. He is a “shameless defender of the old elite,” said Dave shamelessly.

Dave is declaring war on lobbying. “We all know how it works,” said Dave. Do we? I looked round the room. I suspected not. “The lunches, the hospitality, the quiet word in your ear, the ex-ministers and ex-advisers for hire.” Now Dave issued a rallying cry: “We believe in market economics, not crony capitalism.” Surely this was stretching credulity: the Tory party has long been the Heimat of crony capitalism.

Dave wants politics to belong to the people (who may, of course, not want it). The dialect thickened. He decried the use of “automatic guillotines”. He said that “standing committees” were stuffed with “puppets of the Government”. Can this be true? As puppets have no feet or legs, standing could be difficult. Dave kept explaining how only he and the Tories could fix our broken politics. Later he was asked if he could — finally — tell us the tax status of the Tory party donor Lord Ashcroft. But Dave who, only minutes ago was a beacon of new generational transparency and openness, could not tell us. Not only that, he could not tell us why he could not tell us. It made the whole speech seem, like a two-headed snake, at odds with itself.

Dave swept out with the quickest of handshakes and I asked the people around me what they thought. “It’s strange that he came all the way out here to give a speech that was about Westminster,” said one man. Strange, I thought, but oh so true. As far as the inhabitants of SW1 are concerned there is no such place as Eastminster — for a reason.