Tomorrow morning David Cameron and his “Notting Hill massive”, as Westminster wags call them, will gather in their campaign headquarters for the last time. The set of rooms they inhabit in a glass-fronted building on Greycoat Place, Westminster, has been home from home since the starting gun in the Tory leadership race was fired in June.

They will not be planning a wake. A YouGov poll suggests Cameron will win by a margin of two to one when the result is announced on Tuesday. Barring a sensational upset, the 39-year-old former Etonian is all but certain to go into battle with Tony Blair at prime minister’s questions on Wednesday as leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition.

With victory, however, comes an immediate problem. Top of the agenda for Monday’s meeting, say insiders, will be “what to do with David Davis?”

Cameron’s rival for the leadership, and one-time favourite to win, has an ego not to be underestimated. The shadow home secretary has seen his status slip from “SAS hero to middle-management zero” in the space of a few months, joked one of the left of the party last week.

His future raises a question that goes far beyond the fate of the man himself, however, highlighting as it does the central left-right divide within the party. The way in which he is tackled will be seen by many observers as a crucial indicator of how the reformist Cameron intends to lead the party.

For the “Cameroons” it is not so much the beating of the man that is important but the fact they have beaten his politics. If this is the case, some radicals ask, why not banish him to the back benches? What better way of signalling that the Conservative party is on the road to reform?

Others, however, are urging caution. Change has been a major theme of the Cameron campaign but so has bringing a new “reasonableness” to politics. Why not then be magnanimous and offer Davis a second-tier job — shadow defence secretary, for example? It may not be a top job, as one Cameron adviser said this weekend, but it is a job that is “bloody hard to turn down”.

This more pragmatic approach is likely to win out, not least because a slighted Davis could do the Cameroons damage from the back benches, perhaps even plunging the party into civil war.

“Davis needs to be kept in check by being offered a decent, relatively senior job,” explained another Cameron aide. The discussion is not over yet. If Davis does better than expected when the final results are announced, Cameron may have little choice but to keep him as shadow home secretary.

The Davis question is made all the more significant by the fact that Cameron has not necessarily won the hearts of party members but has successfully appealed to their heads by demonstrating his strength among the electorate.

Smart, metropolitan and at ease with modern Britain, the Cameroons have effectively been saying to the blue-rinsed Tory grass roots: “You may not fully understand or even agree with everything we say, but we can win.”

The two political giants of the past 30 years — Thatcher and Blair — pulled off the same trick of appealing to the electorate over the heads of party traditionalists. But there is a difference between them and Cameron.

These political mould breakers can be seen to have had a distinct political agenda from the start, but Cameron stands accused by his opponents of being policy light. Specifically, his critics complain that he has largely defined himself by reference to what he is not, rather than what he is for. He has made plain, for example, that he will not be bashing immigrants, homosexuals, single mothers, political correctness, the NHS or any of the other favourite targets of “populist” Tory campaigns of elections past.

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