BRITAIN: The new British Tory leader starts with the cheers of a party which has set aside a long fixation with ideology, writes Frank Millar
Let's away from Planet Tory and back to earth for a reality check. David Cameron has done spectacularly well to come from rank outsider to claim the Tory crown from early favourite David Davis. And the Conservative Party appears to have thoroughly enjoyed itself in the seven months since its third general election defeat. However, they would be foolish to imagine the country as a whole similarly transfixed by this leadership contest, or as readily disposed to be impressed by its outcome.
It is true that the battle to succeed Michael Howard has kept the party in the news. This threatened to prove a negative when the early headlines proclaimed defeat for Kenneth Clarke, whom polls showed the preferred candidate among voters at large - and was almost certainly a positive as Cameron successfully resisted attempts to force an admission over what drugs if any he took while at university. It is also true that Howard's decision to pre-announce his retirement on the morning after polling day, so triggering this marathon contest, has in the end been vindicated.
This arguably is by accident rather than design, courtesy not least of the failure of the outgoing leadership's attempt to buck the democratic tendency and restore the power of final decision to Conservative MPs alone. No matter. This result enables Howard to retire content in the knowledge that he has finally bequeathed his party a new leader with a mandate - the emphatic support of MPs and constituency activists - greater than that enjoyed by any of his predecessors.
In fairness, too, it should be recalled that those wanting to scrap the leadership rules designed by former leader William Hague were haunted by the nightmare experience of his successor, Iain Duncan Smith, who won the constituency vote only after trailing Kenneth Clarke in the parliamentary contest.
Where "IDS" thus struggled to establish his authority from the outset, Cameron starts with the cheers and plaudits of a party which has set aside a long fixation with ideology in favour of a policy-lite prospectus, sprinkled with apparent stardust and the promise that Cameron's "Compassionate Conservatism" offers them the prospect of power after a long period in the wilderness.
Unfortunately, as Cameron will know, the adulation never lasts long. Promise feeds expectation, and MPs will be expecting the new leader to quickly assert his authority by impressing in his Commons encounters with Tony Blair - starting today.
Outshining Blair at Prime Minister's Questions is hardly the sum total of the task facing the leader of the opposition. Indeed, as Hague can testify, the country appeared not to notice his brilliance at the despatch box most Wednesdays on the road to humiliating defeat in 2001.
Yet strong early performances here will be vital to party morale as Cameron sets about establishing the new mood music of his regime, while long-fingering as much as possible the detail of policy-making for an election still some four years away.
Which is not of course to say he has anything like as long to persuade the British electorate that he will be a serious contender come that contest, in which he expects to find himself pitched against a Labour government reinvented in office under the premiership of Gordon Brown. For ringing in his ears, surely, will be Duncan Smith's keen observation that the public tends to make up its mind about a new leader within the first three or four months.
So, Cameron must hit the ground running, avoiding reckless policy commitments and gaffes, while engendering belief that there is more to his talk of inclusivity, modernity and the centre ground than mere rhetoric.