Is Nassim Nicholas Taleb David Cameron’s new political guru?

The leader of the Opposition David Cameron is keeping some pretty curious company these days, having spent Tuesday sharing a platform at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) with the controversial American writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Taleb, a former Wall Street derivatives trader, is the author of Black Swan, a philosophical tract that says the world can be turned upside down by unpredictable high-impact random events such as 9/11 - the eponymous 'Black Swans' - which institutions are ill-prepared to deal with.

Since the book's 2007 publication, Taleb has become the intellectual of the moment; journalist Bryan Appleyard called him the "hottest thinker in the world" in the Times, while economics Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman called Black Swan "an original and audacious analysis of the ways in which humans try to make sense of unexpected events."

The Tory leader has happily jumped on the Taleb bandwagon, telling the RSA audience that "I very much enjoyed Black Swan. I am trying to come to terms with Black Swan thinking and what it might mean for politics... The danger with reading somebody's book is that it just confirms some of your prejudices and that is why you like it."

But problematically, some of Taleb's beliefs stand quite a bit outside of the values of the Conservative party that Cameron is trying to sell to the British public. Labour has seized upon the Tory leader's endorsement of the Lebanese-American academic, claiming it chimes with the way "eccentric" Tory MEP Daniel Hannan last week escaped censure for telling Fox TV that he "wouldn't wish [the NHS] on anybody".

Cameron made no attempt on Tuesday to criticise Taleb for invoking Charles Darwin's theory of evolution to question why the rich should pay higher taxes to help the well-off. "How can you have evolution if those who do the right thing have to finance those who did the wrong thing?" the 49-year-old asked.

Previously he has also said that in his former career as a trader he "liked" crashes, as they provided more opportunities to make profits. Taleb also queries whether global warming is man-made, arguing that "I'm a hyper-conservative ecologically. I don't want to mess with Mother Nature. I don't believe that carbon thing is necessarily anthropogenic." Taleb has also backed the banking bail-out plan that Gordon Brown championed and which the Conservatives have been merrily attacking.

While Tory officials have pooh-poohed the idea that Taleb is a 'guru' to Cameron, the author was spotted after the RSA event dining with the party's director of strategy Steve Hilton in the House of Commons. But to some political observers is a sign of how Cameron is desperately trying to be taken seriously as a political thinker.

Larry Elliot in the Guardian today writes about the "intellectual confusion" at the heart of the Tory party, and talks about Cameron's political prejudices as being "distinct[ly] pick 'n' mix". Elliot concludes that unless the Tory leader can readily articulate what he actually believes in, "the [British people] might suspect he is a charlatan."