LAST MAY, when Michael Howard announced his intention to resign, there were three important questions, each of which was quite open. The first was whether the Conservative members would retain their democratic right to elect their leader, or hand it back to the narrow group of Conservative Members of Parliament. The second was which of eight or ten potential candidates would be chosen as leader; David Davis was the frontrunner. The third, which may not be settled until 2009, was whether the new leader, when chosen, could defeat the Labour Party at the next general election; most people thought not.

We know the first answer. The chairmen of the local associations did not give the necessary majority to change the rules in favour of the MPs. That quite probably changed the outcome. Once it was clear that the test would be a democratic one, even the MPs themselves looked at the candidates in a different light. As a result, David Cameron, who fought the best democratic campaign, ended up with a majority among MPs. Left to themselves, in an election that would already have occurred, the MPs might well have chosen David Davis. Democracy imposes its own test; an electorate of 300,000 is different from one of 198.

Barring a catastrophe, we know the second answer as well. Cameron will be the next leader of the Conservative Party. The YouGov poll suggests that half the likely votes may already have been cast, and he is leading by two to one. The remaining potential voters are showing the same lead. Although the hustings open only today, it is almost impossible for Davis to reverse that. Indeed, with William Hague and Liam Fox, as well as the majority of Conservative MPs, declaring for Cameron, there is a growing consensus that he will be the next leader.

He deserves to be. At least five out of six Cameron supporters became converts during the campaign. He has picked up his support from every other candidate, past and present, and from the don’t knows. No doubt there will be many Conservatives who will come to believe that they were already Cameron supporters last May, just as there were many more Margaret Thatcher supporters in 1979 than in 1975, but the different groups of Cameronites are only different layers in a skilfully constructed snowball.

Some are, indeed, May Cameronites, others July, still more September and October and some November. The core Cameronites, who were telling him to go for it in May, are particularly important. They represented the collective judgment of the rising generation of active Conservatives.

I have written about them before. They include the ablest group of new Conservative MPs since the postwar recruits, Heath, Macleod, Maudling, Powell. They are a thoroughly effective group of young men, determined to modernise and reconstruct the Conservative Party. Without any fuss, they decided that David Cameron was their choice for leader. One could never have got such a united choice from the comparable generation of the 1950s. If his political contemporaries think that Cameron is the best of their Conservative generation, they have probably got it right. He has also been able to attract the support of Edward Llewellyn, who won golden opinions working for Governor Patten in Hong Kong.

It is not, however, one of the young Turks of the 1950s who reminds me of Cameron, but the old sultan himself, Harold Macmillan. There is the same political detachment; like Macmillan before 1959 Cameron is in good control of his own image. In yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph he wrote: “I believe we need a new style of politics: thoughtful, measured and moderate.” That is exactly what Macmillan did for the Conservative Government in 1958, the year after the Suez defeat. Detachment is a great virtue in political leaders: Macmillan had it; Lord Salisbury had it; Cameron seems to have it.

Of course, the Conservatives are not choosing Cameron because he has detachment, but because they believe he is a potential winner, and something of a star. They were excited by his Blackpool speech, which will go down in history as the speech that won the leadership. In 1963 Lord Hailsham made a Blackpool speech intended to have the same effect; it worked in the hall but alienated the party’s power brokers.

Yet there is still the question: can he win? After eight years and three general elections many Conservatives had given up hope. They thought that the Labour Party had become an irresistible force, which would churn out election victories until the crack of doom. At any rate, they thought that in the aftermath of last May’s election. Now, with Labour in turmoil, Cameron seems likely to benefit from its decline, just as Blair benefited from the decline of the Conservatives.

In the past 110 years there have been six administrations that lasted for a decade or more, as Labour will have done by the next election. (I have counted the Conservatives as dominating one of these periods, from 1916 to 1929, although Labour formed a brief minority government in 1923). After ten years, five of the six long-lasting administrations were turned out, with an average loss of 186 seats. Even the exceptional victory in 1992 only postponed the landslide to 1997. British voters get terminally bored with their governments after ten years.

Tony Blair seems to be playing to David Cameron’s strengths. Blair has recommitted himself to modernising the social services, including health, education and welfare. Since the Labour Party has won three elections with this promise, there is plainly strong public support. Yet Blair cannot deliver, Brown will not deliver, but Cameron could deliver. Cameron will not oppose those measures of Blair’s reforms that the country wants. But Blair cannot afford to depend on Conservative votes in the House of Commons. David Cameron needs a landslide to reach Downing Street; that is not impossible.

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