CANADA’S first right-wing Prime Minister in 13 years took office yesterday promising to clean up government and repair his country’s strained relations with the United States.

Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party won 124 of the 308 seats in the Canadian Parliament in Monday’s bitterly contested elections, compared with 103 for Paul Martin’s Liberals.

Although that still leaves Mr Harper short of an overall majority, his victory nonetheless marks the culmination of a long march back to power for the Conservatives who had been reduced to a rump of just two seats in the 1993 election.

Mr Martin, who had served more than ten years as Finance Minister before getting his chance to succeed Jean Chrétien as Prime Minister, immediately announced his resignation as Liberal leader.

The comparison with the fortunes of British Conservatives will not be lost on the other side of the Atlantic. At the age of 46, Mr Harper is younger than most of his predecessors and he has sought to reposition his party towards the political centre in recent years.

The Tories, after three consecutive election defeats, also have a new young leader in David Cameron who is seeking to regain some of political centreground at the next election — when Labour will almost certainly be led by the current Chancellor, Gordon Brown.

Ed Vaizey, the Conservative MP for Wantage & Didcot, said: “It’s an amusing and useful parallel. It does at least show that being a long-term incumbent can work against a governing party and that moving to the centre can significantly help the Opposition.

“Perhaps Labour will want to heed the warning from the Canadian electorate and rethink its plan to anoint Gordon Brown as the next Prime Minister.”

But even Mr Vaizey, a close supporter of his new leader, acknowledged that Canadian politics should not be seen as an infallible pointer to future British elections.

Indeed, Mr Harper is not — by any stretch of imagination — a Canadian Cameron. He is a shy, perhaps even dull, politician who does not drink or smoke, nor relate easily to ordinary voters. His list of “likes” extends little further than ice hockey, films and cats.

Mr Harper’s wife, Laureen Teskey, with whom he has two young children, appears to represent the feistier half of the marriage. She is a denim-clad, motorcycle-riding farm girl who invariably won bigger cheers at campaign rallies than her husband.

However, he deserves credit for reviving the Canadian Right, creating a new party out of his breakaway Alliance group and the remnants of the old Progressive Conservatives — which he had previously abandoned in protest at their fiscal laxity and weakness towards the Quebec separatists.

During the two-month campaign Mr Harper sought to play down his right-wing reputation by adopting a reassuringly moderate tone on most issues. He remains opposed to gay marriage, but tax cut pledges did not go as far as they might, while Mr Harper has also promised that the health service will remain intact and made it clear that he has no intention of entering the debate on abortion. At the 2004 elections when the Liberals narrowly scraped home, Mr Harper had been portrayed as a right-wing extremist and a likely poodle to the US Administration. Mr Martin attempted to repeat the trick this time with advertisements claiming that “a Harper victory will put a smile on George W. Bush’s face”. Although the Conservative leader had publicly supported the Iraq war, in contrast to Mr Martin who refused to commit Canadian troops to the invasion, Mr Harper largely succeeded in ducking charges of being too pro-Washington. Instead, he hit back at Mr Martin for resorting to “American-style campaign methods”.

But links with the US Administration are likely to improve under Mr Harper. “We look forward to strengthening our relations and working with the new government,” Scott McClellan, President Bush’s spokesman, said yesterday.

Mr Harper has said that he would reconsider a US missile defence scheme rejected by Mr Martin, as well as spend more on the Canadian military, expand its peacekeeping missions and tighten border security.

The Liberals were badly damaged by sleaze allegations, including the channelling of Can$100 million (£48 million) of public money to friends and supporters of Mr Chrétien’s Administration. Mr Martin was not linked directly to this case, but the subsequent disclosure that police were investigating fresh insider trading allegations appeared reminiscent of earlier Liberal scandals and what a recent judicial inquiry concluded was a “culture of entitlement”.

Monday’s election did not end in the Liberal meltdown predicted by some polls, and still leaves Mr Harper seeking coalition partners from either the separatist Bloc Québécois — who have about 51 seats — or the left-wing New Democrats who have increased their standing from 18 to 29.

But the Liberals will find little comfort in these results as they begin their search for a new leader. Some are beginning to focus on the Harvard-educated Michael Ignatieff, newly elected as MP for Etobicoke-Lakeshore and familiar in Britain as a former columnist and BBC Two intellectual icon.

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