FOR THE FIFTH time in a row, the Tories have been panicked into an untimely leadership contest and delivered the wrong result.

The mistake this time was not, as on previous occasions, to choose the wrong candidate as leader. It was to choose the right candidate with the wrong ideas. The unanimous adulation heaped on David Cameron by media pundits and political commentators of all persuasions actually makes me more confident in predicting his failure as an opposition leader than I have been on any political issue since John Major took Britain into the ERM, applauded by a similar ecstatic consensus of the chattering classes.

The exaggerated praise that Mr Cameron has enjoyed for a competent but totally unexceptional performance, first as candidate and now as opposition leader, will reinforce his faith in a strategy that a more dispassionate analysis would reveal to be seriously misconceived. Worse still — and even more reminiscent of John Major’s ERM disaster — Mr Cameron’s misguided strategy is becoming so closely identified with his self-definition as a politician, that any deviation would look like a personal humiliation.

What is this new belief the defines Cameron Conservatism? Like all great heresies the Cameron credo appears in many guises — that the Tories must be the party of public services, not tax cuts; Mr Cameron is the natural heir to Tony Blair and new Labour; Labour under Gordon Brown will veer to the Left and abandon the political centre ground — but all these erroneous beliefs stem from one fundamental misconception: the idea that the Tories will be returned to government on the basis of what they look like, rather than what they stand for.

Mr Cameron and his supporters believe that the Tories keep losing elections because of their nasty, old-fashioned image. Their strategy, therefore, is not to fight actively for power by offering a clear alternative to Labour, but to minimise political differences and emphasise their superior manners and style. Mr Cameron represents the victory not of Blairite ideology but of Mandelson-Campbell spin: the ultimate triumph of style over substance.

But isn’t Mr Cameron adopting the Blairite political methods just when they are going out of style? Not only is Mr Blair now less popular than his party, but the traits which Mr Cameron is trying hardest to mimic — the slickness and ambivalence, the ingratiating, yet self-satisfied, manner — are exactly the aspects of the Blair persona that the public seems most to resent. More fundamentally, Mr Cameron is making two big logical mistakes in concluding that the key to Mr Blair’s success was his “niceness” and his willingness to ape the Tories.

First, while it is true that Mr Blair swapped many old Labour policies for new ones from the Tories, he was careful about which clothes he stole from the Tories. The policies Blair jettisoned, such as nationalisation and favouritism for trade unions, were manifest failures; while the ones he adopted, such as privatisation, were ones that had been shown to work. Mr Cameron, by contrast, is rejecting the Tory policies that are potentially most attractive, such as tax cuts and small government, while adopting the parts of the Labour programme that are about to be rendered obsolete: most importantly, the dogma that the three fastest-growing sectors of the 21st-century economy — health, education and pensions — should continue to be financed and dominated by the State.

The doctrine that health, education and pensions are by their nature “public services” that have to be organised by the State and financed entirely or largely through taxes is becoming unsustainable even for Labour, as evidenced by Gordon Brown’s opposition to expanding the basic state pension. Because the growth of public spending is now approaching the limit of tolerance even for Mr Brown, the biggest political debate in Britain between now and the end of the decade will be about the financing of public service — and indeed about whether intensely personal matters such as health and education should be considered “public” services at all. Yet Mr Cameron has committed the Tories to a dogmatically old Labour position in this debate, just when political and economic realities suggest that new Labour may move beyond these 20th-century ideas.

The second flaw in the Cameron strategy is the emphasis on Mr Blair’s personality as the key to Labour’s success. Labour’s victory in 1997 was mainly a consequence of the Major Government’s failure. A non-ideological charm offensive might work for the Tories in 2009 if Labour followed the Tory example of the late 1990s and self-destructed. But in the absence of a serious failure by the Labour Government, the Tories will have to offer something distinctive to have any chance of persuading voters to switch.

The Tories have long believed in the inevitability of Labour’s self-destruction, but this is wishful thinking. When governments self-destruct, it is usually either through some kind of economic calamity or a split in the governing party — or occasionally both, as in the case of the Tories under Mr Major. A serious economic crisis seems no more likely in the present parliament than in the last one, which leaves Mr Cameron hoping that Labour will split or veer to the left under Mr Brown.

Mr Cameron’s one active strategy for harassing Labour out of office is to encourage this leftward shift and to drive a wedge between Mr Blair and Mr Brown. The trouble is that the more Mr Cameron tries to divide Mr Blair and Mr Brown, the harder they will work to remain united.

And in reality, as opposed to Tory and media mythology, the ideological differences between the two Labour leaders, far from widening, seem to be narrowing by the day, partly because Mr Brown is becoming increasingly exasperated by the meagre results achieved in the public sector in exchange for the vast sums money the Treasury has poured in. With the Chancellor imposing tougher restraints on government spending and leading the Cabinet’s resistance to the public sector unions, Mr Cameron will look increasing ridiculous if he identifies Mr Brown as the “roadblock to reform”, while praising the virtuous, reformist Mr Blair.

By the end of this Parliament, when the Labour Treasury will be squeezing public spending more tightly than Mr Cameron has dared to suggest, the Tories could find themselves allied with Lib Dems in attacking Mr Brown from the statist Left, instead of the free-market Right. And that is a contortion to leave even the handsome, impressive and sincere Mr Cameron looking ugly, ridiculous and dishonest.

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