The Cameron gamble, bewitched by the success of Tony Blair, was to take this even further, to the point where, on most of the major issues confronting the country, his position has been virtually indistinguishable from that of the other main parties. To see where this has left us, one has only to imagine what might have happened last week had we had a Tory leader more like a reincarnation of Mrs Thatcher, exposing the destructive emptiness of almost everything the New Labour project stood for: on the bloated powers and intrusions of bureaucracy, on Europe, on immigration, on defence, on our delusional energy policy, and above all on by far the most serious issue confronting Britain today, that unprecedented public spending deficit which will soon force us to cut back the public sector on a scale no party dared mention in their irrelevant election campaigns.