THE MOST recent opinion polls look like a new dawn for the Conservative Party. For 13 years, from Black Wednesday in 1992 until the election of David Cameron as leader, the Conservatives were in the low thirties or even down in the twenties in the polls. They lost three general elections, in 1997, 2001 and 2005 — all three by landslides.

It was the longest period of defeat in the party’s modern history, and the worst. It was a miserable decade for Tories.

The latest polls are much better. The Conservatives won the local government elections in early May. This week’s YouGov poll gives them 38 per cent, Labour 32 and the Liberal Democrats only 16. These figures make it entirely possible that the Conservatives will win the next general election outright, though the election may not come for three or four years. At least they are now in contention in a way they have not been since 1992.

Various factors account for this big recovery. The Labour Government has been performing almost incredibly badly — weak, incompetent and sleazy. Tony Blair, so formidable a party leader for so long, is in rapid decline, with a weakening grip on his administration and now actually apologising for the failure of his policies.

John Prescott has made the Government look greedy and ridiculous. Labour is seen as the corrupt party. The Home Office has lost control of immigration, repatriation and the prisons. The Government has been fulfilling the old rule that oppositions do not win elections, governments lose them.

Politicians do not like to talk of the swing of the pendulum because such an automatic process seems to make their work redundant. If the pendulum is going to swing anyway, why bother to campaign? Yet the swing of the pendulum is an historic political reality. Apart from the Conservative victory in 1992, which proved to be a disaster, no British party has won four democratic elections in a row. Two parliaments in power are normal; three are not uncommon; four is unique.

I do not believe that Labour can expect a fourth victory in 2008. The Liberal Democrats as well as Labour are doing badly. This has happened before. When Labour starts to weaken, and voters think it is time for a change, they do not usually turn to the Liberals. They vote for the Conservatives, as they did in 1951, 1970 and 1979. Sir Menzies Campbell is an excellent man, but his leadership does not fit the modern cult of youth; David Cameron’s does.

The failure of Labour, the decline of Tony Blair, the swing of the pendulum, the lacklustre Lib Dems, have given the Tories a great opportunity. David Cameron is taking it. He has the same combination of youth, energy and political charm as the young Tony Blair. He is probably the most attractive Conservative Leader of the Opposition since Disraeli, though one should remember that the Conservative Party has not usually been in opposition.

Really effective leaders of the Opposition are among the rarest of political figures, far rarer than good Prime Ministers. One thinks of Mr Blair at his peak, then one goes back to Gladstone and Disraeli, and then still further to Charles James Fox. The Conservatives badly needed their Blair and they have found him. This does not mean that Mr Cameron has converted all his party to his liberal views. However, the Conservative Party has seldom been a party of the hard Right.

No doubt the disastrous situation of the 1970s, the successive failure of the Wilson, Heath and Callaghan administrations, called for rigorous Thatcherite measures. But more typical Conservative leaders, particularly Winston Churchill, have been liberal Conservatives — as were Harold Macmillan and Stanley Baldwin. This is the moderate tradition in which Mr Cameron is leading his party. That tradition allowed the Conservatives to dominate British politics in the late 19th and 20th centuries. It is very much part of the English culture.

The first real sign of recovery came in the 2005 election when, for the first time since 1992, the Conservatives overtook Labour in the English popular vote. Events even more than opinions will determine how liberal Mr Cameron is able to be. In the 1970s world inflation and the trade union response to that inflation made liberal policies look ineffective, whether they were being applied by Conservatives or Labour. Now we seem again to be moving into a period in which the big problems are the tough problems.

No doubt the British electorate is quite liberal-minded — it usually is. Yet when one looks at the virtual collapse of the Blair Government, one sees that its main problems cannot easily be solved by liberal policies. John Reid has come to the top because he is a political bruiser at a time when a bruiser is needed. In fact, the Conservative campaign in 2005, for which Mr Cameron shared responsibility, emphasised themes that seemed to call for more, rather than less, conservative responses. That is why the immediate crisis of government is so heavily concentrated on the Home Office. Crime, prison, repatriation, immigration, asylum, terrorism, are not problems that easily lend themselves to liberal or liberal Conservative solutions.

Many Conservatives, particularly in the Midlands and the North, still think there has not been too little liberalism, but too much. David Cameron fits one Conservative stereotype remarkably well, as Anthony Eden did in the late 1930s. He personifies the Disraelian ideal of Young England. But he has to hold his party together, North as well as South, Birmingham as well as London, old as well as young, poor as well as rich, conservative as well as liberal. He cannot fly on only one wing.

Events are looking tougher — Labour itself has had to move to the right. Mr Cameron has successfully projected a liberalism that makes his Conservatism very attractive. Yet it may be his relationship with a tougher-minded tradition of conservatism that will determine his success.

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