Outside Labour's core vote, the electorate is pretty sure that the party is unfit to govern but it does not yet understand how and why the Tories are. Some people say that Cameron will not declare himself because there is a vacuum at the centre of the man, an absence of real belief or conviction about anything that matters. Can this really be true? I would prefer to give him the benefit of the doubt, and say that, for all his tactical courage, there remains at the core of the man a knot of fear.

Back in Witney Peter Hitchens is still holding up his hand. Nearly an hour has passed. Finally, when the last question has been posed by members of the audience, Cameron turns to the columnist. It is rather clever of him to have kept him waiting so long, if also perhaps a little unwisely rude, given that he is one of only two or three unremitting adversaries in the Tory press. He must have known that Hitchens would ask the most piercing question, and that, had he been allowed to do so at the beginning, he might have darkened the mood of the meeting, before doubtless trying to ask another one.

The question is whether it was "right to claim £1,700 a month from the pay packets of nurses and dinner ladies" towards the mortgage on his country house. This is a reference to the Camerons' pleasant home near Witney, which, as something of an amateur expert on the north Oxfordshire property market, I would estimate to be worth about a million and a half pounds. The aggressive questioning silences the audience. There is a glint of fear in Cameron's eyes, though his smile never leaves his face. He admits that he is "someone who is relatively well-off" and has enjoyed "a career in business", but ridicules Hitchens's suggestion that he and his family may be worth £30 million. If this is so, his wife must have run off with the money. We all smile, and relax. Besides, adds Cameron, he was only claiming for the interest on his mortgage, as he was entitled to do.

In a charming, Tony Blair sort of way, he didn't actually answer the question. He didn't say whether he thought it was morally right for a wealthy man to take taxpayers' money to enable him to buy an even bigger country house than he would have been otherwise able to do. I'd say it wasn't. Is Hitchens right to compare Cameron to Blair? These are different times and they are different men. The point about Blair is that he had the world at his feet. His majority was impregnable. His economic inheritance from the Tories was sweet. And yet all the ideas and hopes and plans came to so very little. In the end New Labour has thrown it all away.

Cameron appears to have even fewer policies than Blair did in 1997, and he seems likely to become Prime Minister in far more difficult circumstances. I'd say that he is probably tougher than Blair, and probably cleverer. Until or unless he lets us into his detailed thinking, though, it is impossible to predict what kind of Prime Minister David Cameron is going to be.