So deep is Labour's despair about Gordon Brown that some in his government express a bleaker view of their own future than does the opposition. In part, of course, this is tactical: the lower expectations, the less awful the party will look if its performance is better than catastrophic.
Many voters want Mr Brown out more than they want Mr Cameron in. Following the expenses scandal the whole political class is mistrusted, promoting abstentions and fringe party votes. In consequence, Conservative propaganda emphasises the perils, in a close election, of self-indulgent doubters voting for UK Independence party or the British National party. The electorate must be persuaded that Tory candidates need every dissenting ballot.
Mr Cameron has been wooing the Ulster Unionists. I suggested to a senior Conservative that, throughout the past 150 years, all English political parties which horse-traded for Irish support lived to regret it. The Unionists hold only a handful of seats. My friend shrugged: "That handful could be vital to enable us to rule"�.
It is overwhelmingly likely that Mr Cameron will become prime minister. But given the electoral mountain the Tories must climb, they are fearful of finding themselves attempting to govern, and to do things that cannot fail to be unpopular, with a hairbreadth parliamentary majority and perceived weak mandate.
Tony Blair in 1997 offered two clear messages. He committed himself to address Britain's crumbling public services and to sustain a low-tax economy. Mr Cameron, by contrast, gives mixed signals. He has pledged to tackle the public-sector deficit, but has been shifting ground about when and how. This week, his party appeared to wobble about the timing and severity of its age of austerity. It is also evasive about such controversial matters as more nuclear power stations to avert an energy crisis, and restricting immigration. No one, save the closest Cameron associates, knows how vigorously he will attack the bloated British state, or what he will do with taxes. He has ring-fenced health and overseas aid spending.
All this may reassure some swing voters, but damages his claims to be the standard-bearer of realism. Mr Cameron's critics see a party contour-flying with a morbidly sensitive eye to every hillock of popular sentiment, but a much less obvious view of its destination. The charge is made that the "Cameron project"� consists of Dave himself and nobody much else. A veteran Tory MP said: "I won't tell you all our ministers will be a big improvement on the current incumbents, because it would not be true"�.
At every previous period of the past 70 years during which the Tories were out of office, their front bench boasted "big beasts"� in waiting, with ministerial experience and high public profiles. Today, Ken Clarke is the last such survivor. The rest of Mr Cameron's team are untried and have little resonance with the public.
If the Tories gain office, they will inherit a wrecked economy and graver fiscal problems than Margaret Thatcher faced in 1979. Critics on the Tory right who distrust Mr Cameron as "not a proper Conservative"� assert contemptuously that boys will be addressing men's work.
This litany of doubts and uncertainties must be acknowledged in any honest analysis of the current mood of British politics. Yet I reject much of it, because I am a Cameron believer. The Tory leader seems a man of remarkable gifts, who may confound the doubters and prove an outstanding prime minister. Tactically, his caution about policy commitments is unheroic, but merits sympathy. The Brown government is screaming earthwards towards a fatal crash. A precipitate Tory commitment to curb the welfare state alone might save it.
Mr Cameron would be absurdly foolish to commit himself to the timing and scale of public spending cuts until he has seen the books and can judge when recovery is strong enough to retrench. His team is no more justly vulnerable to the charge of inexperience than was Mr Blair's in 1997.
George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, and his kind might quote G.K. Chesterton: "I shall seek neither to excuse nor to deny the immortal crime of being young"�. Mr Cameron possesses the ruthlessness to discard even his closest associates if they fail in their roles, as some new ministers always do "“ remember the feeble showing in office of Lady Thatcher's favourite guru, Keith Joseph.
The Tory leader will have the notable advantage that most of Britain realises how awful is its predicament, the impossibility of continuing as we are. He has high ambitions for the country as well as for himself. He is a master of rhetoric, ornamented by wit and self-knowledge. He is comfortable in his own skin in a fashion that Mr Brown conspicuously is not.
Some sceptics seem eager to fear the worst about the next government even before the old, unequivocally disastrous one has been dismissed. Yet great challenges offer great opportunities. For all the spurious excitement about party manifestos, most elections are about leaders. British politics has become overwhelmingly presidential. Before the Tories can do anything else they must gain power, for which millions of votes must be dredged from the treacherous marshes of the centre. Many of us will forgive Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne their indisputable opacity today, provided that they possess a clear private vision, and pursue this with courage if they achieve power.
The writer is an FT contributing editor
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