I ONCE WON a competition for the world’s most boring book title with this: Hospital Purchase Records Containing Grain Price Information in 15th-century Ghent. (It’s real — I own a copy.) So I am aware that an article on the theme “The Swedish Moderate Party — Past and Current Electoral Tactics” might not seem, at first instance, a rip-roaring read.

But trust me. An alternative expression of the theme could instead be: “Can Cameron’s Conservatives Win? Here’s the Answer”. That, I hope, is slightly more enticing.

On Sunday, the Moderate Party (the equivalent of the Conservatives) won the Swedish general election. In alliance with three other centre-right parties, the Moderates beat the incumbent Social Democrats by just 2 per cent.

“Just” 2 per cent is not really a fair description of the scale of the achievement. Four years ago, the Moderates were written off as a political force. In the 2002 election, the party won just 15 per cent of the vote — its worst performance for three decades. I remember sitting in a café in Brussels with a defeated Moderate MP, who told me that he had decided to leave Sweden for good. The country, he said, was beyond help. The Social Democrats were tired and wrong. By pandering to the fool’s paradise of the electorate — that it was possible to prosper with an ageing workforce, high taxes and lavish welfare — they had won 40 per cent of the vote, a big share in a political system such as Sweden’s. The Moderates were regarded as extremists for proposing tax cuts and changes to the welfare culture.

And yet within months of that conversation, the Moderates were ahead in the polls and their leader regarded as the most likely next prime minister.The reason? The election in October 2003 of Fredrik Reinfeldt to the party leadership, and a change in the tone and presentation of policies.

Most political or historical parallels are stretched in order to make a point and ignore so many other factors that they become misleading. But in this instance, there are two obvious and instructive parallels with Britain. Their names are Tony Blair and David Cameron. Both have been bright, new, young leaders who took charge of a party viewed as unelectable and transformed its poll ratings. The difference, of course, is that Mr Blair has won power. So far, Mr Cameron has merely looked like doing so.

But the comparison with the two British leaders points to the most interesting aspect of the Reinfeldt parallel: whether the Moderate leader has won power on the basis of a genuinely changed outlook, or whether he has skilfully changed his party’s image in order to win power and implement his party’s long-standing principles.

Mr Blair famously remarked after winning power in 1997 that “we were elected as new Labour and we will govern as new Labour”. If by that he meant that he would not revert to the more glaringly unpopular elements of Labour’s traditional desires — such as nationalisation — then he has indeed governed as new Labour. But he has also been happy to use conventional social democrat taxing and spending as his most basic tool, so to that extent he has used a changed image to facilitate a traditional Labour government, using traditional Labour methods.

The big question being asked of Mr Reinfeldt is the same question that Mr Cameron’s strikingly “new Conservative” statements give rise to: whether, having been elected as a new Moderate, he will govern as a new Moderate.

Mr Cameron has adopted hook, line and sinker the tactics of Mr Reinfeldt. The Swedish conservative started talking about his passion for improving schools and hospitals, rather than adopting the usual centre-right tactic of keeping as quiet as possible about them, in fear that any mention would be a vote loser. And he ditched his party’s broad-brush tax cuts approach in favour of targeted reductions focused on the poor and business to help to boost job creation. George Osborne may not yet have announced the Tory tax plans, but there’s no need to wait to find out the basic idea. Just look at the Moderates’ manifesto.

It’s not just policies that have been borrowed. Mr Reinfeldt first created a stir by going tie-less when he took over his party. Mr Cameron has even used Mr Reinfeldt’s themes: “(Göran Persson, the outgoing Prime Minister has introduced many times the question that he is soon to be leaving . . . I think the perception is that I have the future ahead of me and he has his future behind him.” Or as Mr Cameron put it, rather more catchily, of Mr Blair: “He was the future once.”

Mr Cameron is trying the same Blairite trick that Mr Reinfeldt has just pulled off. He is luring new supporters by sounding very different from any previous leader of his party and emphasising that he is centre-right rather than right-of-centre. And he is holding on to existing supporters and party members who, after a succession of election defeats, are so desperate for power that they will back a winner whatever he says.

It worked a treat for Mr Reinfeldt. As Prime Minister, however, we have no idea if he will govern as centre-right or right-of-centre. And we have no idea even if Mr Cameron will win, let alone how he will govern.

But what we do know is that the man who first pulled the trick off, Tony Blair, soon found out that while it is brilliant for winning elections, in power it is a recipe for little more than the occupation of office.

Stephen Pollard is a senior fellow at the Centre for the New Europe, in Brussels

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