Cameron took a risk in promoting this deep-blue Tory but he also knew that it was not a leap into the unknown. Although Paterson is candid in private, Cameron sees him as a team player. Paterson may be a man of the Right but he's also very much a party loyalist. If he goes public with concerns — as he did last year, giving a very Eurosceptic interview in advance of Cameron's eventual veto of the fiscal union treaty — he only does so after enormous thought. He may reach conclusions that are sometimes disagreeable to people but he has always done so after careful research and reflection. Cameron admires that in ministers.

One reason for Paterson's elevation is his capacity for hard work. In every brief he has held, whether at transport, agriculture or Northern Ireland, he has put in the hours. He has built deep and wide relationships with every stakeholder in each one of those portfolios. 

Another development that has made Paterson stronger has been his growing standing with the press. Charles Moore is a long-time friend. Peter Oborne has been an admirer and he occasionally dines with Simon Heffer. Until recently that was about it. In the last year, however, Paterson has started to enlarge his circle: a steady stream of opinion-formers went to Belfast to spend weekends with the Patersons at Hillsborough Castle, the Northern Ireland Secretary's residence. No taxpayers were hurt in the process because the Patersons met all incidental expenses. (Unlike other ministers he escaped unscathed during the MPs' expenses scandal.) Paterson won new friends while mingling inspections of the improvements he was making to the Hillsborough rose gardens with conversations about the future of Conservatism.

Paterson's secret weapon is his intelligent and well-connected wife Rose. Never far from his side, this daughter of the late Viscount Ridley and sister of the  science writer Matt Ridley could have been a leading Conservative MP in her own right if she had been born two decades later. Like Anne Jenkin and a number of other Tory wives, she may have been deterred by the fact that Conservative Associations were then seldom the open-minded, equal opportunity selectors that they usually are today.