Cameron: I see street crime all around me

In a new book written with GQ editor Dylan Jones, the Tory leader said he had been burgled twice at his home in North Kensington in the past eight years and had had his car stolen.

Mr Cameron also told how he was followed late one night by a "white van man" who tried to push him off his bike into the path of a car. The man hit him in the back but he avoided injury. "He gave me a hell of a shock," he said, in the book Cameron on Cameron. But he insisted he didn't feel "particularly" nervous walking the streets. "I don't want to get into this or else I'll sound like Jacqui Smith [the Home Secretary who said she would feel unsafe walking round the capital late at night]".

Mr Cameron added: "It's sort of all around you in London. I often see one of those yellow incident signs near where I live. A mugging, a robbery, a murder... in the years living in London, in the last 10 years, I've witnessed a mugging near where I live."

He also accused the police of losing a lot of the confidence of "hard working, law-abiding people". He said one reason for this was "the target culture that has been imposed on police by Labour, which means that they tend to go after easy cases rather than difficult cases, and that means obviously demonising the middle classes to a certain extent and targeting people who are fundamentally law-abiding".

In contrast to former shadow home secretary David Davis, Mr Cameron said he was "a fan of CCTV", although he stressed he was opposed to ID cards. His aim in government, Mr Cameron said, would be to heal Britain's "broken society". "I'm going to be as radical a social reformer as Mrs Thatcher was an economic reformer, and radical social reform is what this country needs right now," he said.

Mr Cameron also admitted that he cried at his wedding and said that he made a point of finding time in his political schedule for his wife, Samantha, and their children. "Family rules - for two nights a week, I come home early enough to be with Sam; one I should be back for suppertime and the other I should be back to do bathtime with the children," he said.

On religion, he said he was a "pretty classic Church of England 'wracked with doubt and scepticism' believer".