NO

BY ROBIN HARRIS

The enthusiasm with which the Conservatives greet their leader at the annual party conference will be artificially heightened this year by embarrassed knowledge of how near the party came to ditching him 12 months ago. Had Gordon Brown called an election then, David Cameron would be one of the less important footnotes in the Tory Party's long history of assassination. He was lucky, but fortune does favour the brave, which he also was. While it is true that he dug the hole into which he nearly fell, he at least showed agility in stepping back from it.

The Conservatives, faced by a tired administration, a charmless Prime Minister and a sharp economic turndown, are now on course for victory at the next election. That victory will be inglorious, as winning by default always is - but it is better than losing in a fair fight. The party leadership will be warning against complacency or arrogance. So it may be uneasy at the suggestion made here by my old friend Bruce Anderson that David Cameron is not only a winner, but that he is more of a Thatcherite than Thatcher.

Such paradoxes make interesting journalism, just as historical revisionism sells books. But counterintuitive propositions usually turn out to be flawed, and so is this. Bruce Anderson has a fund of amusing stories, some of which are printable, but he clearly believes that the old ones are the best. With a different cast - substitute Sir John Major, Bruce's hero then, for David Cameron, his hero now - and this one has been around for 15 years. Major, on this scenario, was to give practical effect to aspirations which Thatcher had just stridently asserted. He didn't.

Cameron is a more skilful and intelligent politician than Major. But, like his old boss, he is an operator, a pragmatist, indeed an opportunist, with no clear philosophy but a ruthless streak and a pleasing manner. Such figures come and go in politics, and they have their merits and uses. But they have nothing in common with those rare, impossible, magnificent political giants, who seize nations by the scruff of the neck and hurl them into a new direction. David Cameron is blessed (or cursed) with a gaggle of cheerleading commentators who might have learned their trade as members of the Nicolai Ceausescu Appreciation Society. He should ignore them. He is not - and should not try to be - Margaret Thatcher, though he can learn from her.