After Gordon Brown has bathed his conference platform in blue and as Norman Tebbit pronounces the newish prime minister as Thatcher’s heir, one might be forgiven for feeling somewhat ideologically disoriented. But politics tends to disorient. And bitter internecine feuds and overarching partisan positioning can create sudden and unexpected allies.

So it was perhaps not entirely unexpected that last week Hillary Clinton felt a distinct draft of warm air coming her way . . . from the right. The New York Times columnist David Brooks, a template for responsible, moderate conservative opinion, gushed a little. Clinton has long been under fire from the “netroots” left, the internet political activists, for her original vote for the Iraq war and refusal to disavow it.

Then last weekend, in a total of five appearances on five different Sunday talk shows, Clinton went further, as Brooks recounted, with a smile on his face: “On This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Clinton could have vowed to vacate Iraq. Instead, she delivered hawkish mini-speeches that few Republicans would object to. She listed a series of threats and interests in the region and made it clear that she’d be willing to keep US troops there to handle them.

The fact is, many Democratic politicians privately detest the netroots’ self-righteousness and bullying. They also know their party has a historic opportunity to pick up disaffected Republicans and moderates, so long as they don’t blow it by drifting into cuckoo land.

Cuckoo land now means any firm indication that Clinton might actually abort the occupation of Iraq in any meaningful way in her first term of office. If you want to see just how successful President Bush and General Petraeus have been in buying more time – and $190 billion next year – for an indefinite American occupation of the Middle East, Brooks’s provocation tells you most of what you need to know.

Last Wednesday night, for good measure, all three main candidates for the Democratic nomination refused to pledge that all troops would be out of Iraq in their first term of office. That was news enough. But Clinton, earlier that day in the Senate, moved one step even further to the pro-war right by voting for a nonbinding resolution that declares the Iranian Revolutionary Guards a “terrorist entity”.

Since this terrorist entity is part of the Iranian state, this was understandably regarded by many as a small but necessary congressional step towards authorising war on Iran. None of her rivals in the presidential campaign voted with her. No wonder neoconservatives are taking a second look at a woman they once demonised.

Josh Bolten, Bush’s chief of staff, told the Washington Examiner last week how the president sees Clinton’s role. He said that Bush wants enough continuity in his occupation policy to ensure that “even a Democratic president would be in a position to sustain a legitimate presence there”. Bush has already declared that he believes Clinton will be the nominee. Bolten continued: “He wants to create the conditions where a Democrat not only will have the leeway, but the obligation to see it out.”

Clinton appears to be following Bush’s script. Republican bloggers were near ecstatic. From the point of view of some it was win-win. Patrick Ruffini wrote on a leading Republican website: “Hillary is morphing into a George W Bush Democrat. While that will draw heat from an increasingly desperate Obama, she will pay the price in the general election, not because she’s totally wrong, but because Democrat-inclined voters will smell something fishy about their gal acting like the one they’ve so long fantasised of kicking to the kerb.”

In contrast the latest conventional wisdom on Barack Obama is a little like the latest conventional wisdom on David Cameron. Here’s Tebbit on Cameron: “David and his colleagues – the very clever young men they have in Central Office these days – are intellectually very clever but they have no experience of the world whatsoever. He has spent much of his time in the Conservative party and as a public relations guy. Well, it’s not the experience of most people in the streets. That’s the real attack and it’s damaging to him.”

And here’s Brooks on Obama: “Obama and [John] Edwards get most of their support from the educated, affluent liberals. According to Gallup polls, Obama garners 33% support from Democratic college graduates, 28% from those with some college and only 19% with a high school degree or less. Hillary Clinton’s core support on the other hand comes from those with less education and less income – more Harry Truman [the former US president] than Howard Dean [the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate].” Yep, Clinton is the spitting image of Truman, isn’t she? The more likely explanation is that at this stage in the campaign Clinton’s massive name recognition and connection to a beloved former president weigh heavily in the minds of the vast majority of voters who haven’t exactly paid a lot of attention to the race so far.

And most of those tend not to be among the upper-middle classes. Equally Brown is clearly enjoying a reverse kind of honeymoon. His very lack of glibness and ability to include verbs in his sentence structure has come as something of a relief from the grinning and spinning of his predecessor. And culturally the rather dour Brown is indeed more compatible with the grumpier older Tory set than the open-minded hugs of young Dave.

Still, we may be getting a little ahead of ourselves. I doubt Brown or Clinton are quite as comfortable with their new allies as their allies appear to be with them. There are dangers with such cross-party appeals as well as advantages. Brown and Clinton, with long careers in public life, have learnt that the public’s moods can be fickle, that popular favourites can become overnight casualties and that even your longtime enemies, under the right circumstances, become a temporary friend.

And the operative word there is “temporary”. What Clinton in particular must fear is that those very Republicans and conservatives who are now exhibiting a lot of private sympathy and support may merely be setting her up for next year.

They may like a Democrat willing to legitimise Bush’s Iraq catastrophe today, but tomorrow they could get John “No Surrender” McCain or Rudy “Let’s Bomb Iran Now” Giuliani. They know her residual negatives; and they think they know how to beat her like a piñata. And Clinton knows they know. This is a conservative flirtation with Hillary, not a marriage. And she’s a woman with some experience of untrustworthy men.

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