Most people might expect to spend their anniversary sipping a glass of champagne at a nice restaurant. But not Dave Cameron. Next week it will be business as usual as he completes his first 12 months in the post of leader of Her Majesty’s opposition.

No prizes for guessing what he will be up to. Yes, he’ll be getting his knees dirty with “eco warrior” types and giving another speech on the environment. Perhaps later he may pop over to the Eagle pub near the Guardian offices in London in the hope of meeting up with his new friend Polly.

Polly Toynbee, the Guardian columnist and proselytiser of new Labour values, is the latest icon for the Tories. Her four-bedroom house in Clapham has taken on the status of a shrine. Some of the most important debates in political discourse are said to take place across her dining room table. According to friends, not a month goes by without a cabinet minister or doyen of new Labour dropping in. Tessa Jowell one day, Trevor Phillips the next.

Cameron has yet to clamp on his cycle clips and take a spin from North Kensington across the river to the Toynbee residence. But metaphorically speaking, the spirit of the Camerons is alive and well in SW4.

Last week one of Dave’s apparatchiks embraced Toynbee as one of their own. Greg Clark, former central office policy guru and now MP for Tunbridge Wells, said the party should ditch its Churchillian ideas about the welfare state in favour of some of the progressive views advanced by the columnist.

Winston Churchill advocated a social “safety net” for the poor. However, modern Tories acknowledge that such trickle-down economics do not work and accept Toynbee’s view that society’s poorest should not be left behind.

“It’s all about triangulation — doing what you are not expected to do,” says one Conservative insider. “This whole year has been about one big message: the Tory party has changed to become a nice, centrist and pragmatic party that cares.”

By this account, Tony Blair did the same. “He turned up to cocktail parties in the City when everyone expected a Labour leader to be in a duffle coat on the picket line. He flirted with celebrities when everyone expected a Labour leader to be dour and worthy.

“We are using the same tactic in the opposite direction. It’s about being counter-intuitive to get the message across that you’ve changed.”

Cameron has shown a deft grasp of triangulation by travelling to different points of the globe and coming up with unexpected views. One moment he was riding behind huskies on a Norwegian glacier, the next riding a bicycle and hugging “hoodies”.

Last week, when Blair was returning from a visit to Pakistan and Afghanistan, it was the pictures of Cameron posing with refugees in Darfur that stole the front pages. He sat cross-legged on a rug, listening to eyewitness accounts of how the Janjaweed militia had attacked nearby villages. “It is quite horrific,” he said.

()All very well. But where does it leave the voters? At what point do the stunts end and the substance begin?

Cameron's people have enlisted so-called “validators”, independent popular figures whom they can call upon to give them credibility. Cameron has brought on board Bob Geldof, the rock star-cum-poverty campaigner to head one of his policy groups. Another star is Zac Goldsmith, editor of the Ecologist magazine.

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