Of Cameron the man I feel I have glimpsed something. Everyone who knows him well says he is a hard nut, with most adding that he is decent enough. Even those who don't know him can see easily enough that he is exceptionally decisive. Look how he grasped the issue of MPs' misappropriation of taxpayers' money while Brown was staggering around like a horse with lockjaw, pretending to be in charge. In truth, Tory MPs were at least as much at fault as their Labour counterparts, but Cameron's bustling sense of concern persuaded people that he had risen to the occasion in a way Brown could not. This is not just an anecdotal impression. Opinion polls apparently confirm it.

Equally, Cameron's methodical, step-by-step "decontaminating" (his word) of the Tory party following his election as leader in 2005 evinced the same qualities of determination. Here there are clear parallels with Blair. While the young Labour leader had Brown, Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell to help him remodel the Labour party, Cameron has relied mostly on his friend, George Osborne, his spin doctor, Steve Hilton, and Andy Coulson, his media man and a former editor of the News of the World, to refashion his crew.

The Tory Right suggested that the party had lost the elections of 2001 and 2005 because it had not embraced sufficiently right-wing polices. Cameron thought the opposite. He believed that, by implying even tiny cuts in public expenditure or suggesting that the NHS was not absolutely perfect in conception or by mentioning the possible ill-effects of immigration, the Tories had rendered themselves unelectable. It couldn't be allowed to happen again. 

And so we have had what has really been a brilliant, single-minded PR rebranding campaign, from the huskies to the hugging of "hoodies" to all the green stuff to the ditching of grammar schools. Any Tory who sounded vaguely racist or otherwise off-message has been hounded out without even the benefit of a kangaroo court. Much of this has been distasteful to many traditional Conservatives, including columnists such as the Daily Telegraph's Simon Heffer and my friend Peter Hitchens, but they have had to lump it. Cameron's probably correct insight was that the Tories would never win a general election again so long as they could be portrayed by the media, and in particular by an all-powerful BBC, as numbskull Neanderthals on the wrong side of history.

Hence the courting of Polly Toynbee and the Guardian, which acts as the BBC's brain and, God help us, its moral conscience. The Tory leader was at it again only the other day, sycophantically name-checking Ms Toynbee as he unveiled his thoughts about constitutional reform at — where else? — a Guardian-sponsored conference. It evidently doesn't matter to Cameron that Polly viscerally hates Tories. (I remember her mocking the blameless Tory magnifico Sir Patrick Mayhew in a column shortly after New Labour's victory in 1997 because she didn't like his voice or appearance.) Cameron is utterly unsentimental in such matters — in a word, ruthless.