JUST how new is this "new politics" business, then? It is easy to be cynical about the idea that the coalition government has changed very much about British politics, at least outside the charmed circle of the government. After all, rank-and-file Conservatives and Liberal Democrats still seem to dislike each other quite a lot, and to disagree instinctively on everything from Europe to the role of the state. Plenty of Lib Dems are watching the current Labour leadership race, hoping that someone congenial like David Miliband carries the day, so that they can forge a nice, progressive Lib-Lab coalition at the next election.

But talking to various figures close to David Cameron in recent weeks, I keep finding myself brought up short by the sense that the Cameroons really do think the established order has been turned upside down, even if many of their peers cannot see it. Furthermore, they do not think this is an aberration, that will be righted at the next election.

Nick Boles—founder of the modernisers' favourite think tank, Policy Exchange, and now a freshly-minted Conservative MP—has today published a book (and a matching Times op-ed) on coalition Britain, calling for an electoral pact between Mr Cameron and his Lib Dem deputy, Nick Clegg. Mr Boles thinks the two parties should divvy up the seats they currently hold and agree to give the coalition incumbent a clear run at the general election planned for 2015 if that election is run under the current first-past-the-post voting system. Thus in Lib Dem held seats (or those seats that would have been won by Lib Dems if forthcoming boundary changes had been in place in May), the Conservatives would not put up a candidate and would urge supporters to vote Lib Dem, and vice versa. If the country has moved to an Alternative Vote electoral system by 2015, the pact would involve the coalition parties urging their supporters to give the other party their second preference on the ballot.

The reaction has been sceptical and revealing. In the corridors and tearooms of Westminster, big beasts from the Tory right were to be heard grumbling today that Mr Boles was merely fuelling the worst fears of the party's paranoid tendency. Translated, this referred to the belief on the right that the Cameroons are happy about failing to win the election, because they feel closer to Lib Dem metropolitan liberalism than to red-meat Conservatism.

The thoughtful, well-connected Paul Goodman has a more subtle posting on the Conservative Home website, raising a series of practical doubts about the idea of a pact. These include the difficulty of working out which party has the greater claim to seats after the coming boundary changes and the likelihood that Tory voters would be more likely to heed the pact and vote Lib Dem than their new Lib Dem allies, who might well just go off and vote Labour. Scan the readers' comments on Conservative Home, and amongst the tribal venting there are some sober, sensible-sounding objections. For example, a reader reports that in Australia (where AV is already the electoral system) it has proved devilishly hard for the conservatives of the Liberal/National coalition to make second preference pacts work. As a result, in some states the two parties have had to merge.

And yet, and yet. I cannot shake the feeling that all these careful, practical objections make sense only if you suppose that the electoral landscape has been shifted about a little bit by the 2010, but remains essentially the same, familiar place known to generations of activists and MPs. My hunch is that well-informed types around Mr Cameron think the landscape has been radically changed, and—crucially—is about to be hit by tectonic shifts that will render the old political maps almost irrelevant. Perhaps it is flying a kite for Mr Boles to suggest an electoral pact with the Lib Dems this autumn. But next autumn? There are grown-up Cameroons would would not rule it out. They think that not just voters but a lot of MPs have yet to wake up to the full horrors of the public spending cuts that are on the way, and the depths of unpopularity facing this coalition.

Such tectonic shifts would reshape the landscape for both Tories and Lib Dems, they think. Some Tories look at voting trends over the last few general elections and wonder whether their party can plausibly ever win a majority in a British election again. Once you are in that sort of mindset, an electoral pact that snapped up the Lib Dems before Labour could recruit them starts to look like an act of caution or craftiness, rather than an outrageous gamble or an act of political treason.

As for the Lib Dems, a piece by Andrew Rawnsley in the weekend's Observer—quoting a Lib Dem cabinet minister's prediction that the Conservatives could be on 25% support in polls next year and the Lib Dems on a truly terrifying 5%—was being taken perfectly seriously around Westminster today. A short while ago, a senior Tory privately offered his prediction the Liberal Democrats would be destroyed by their membership of the coalition. Nick Clegg and his inner circle had been revealed as sort of Tories in disguise, he mused. Several Lib Dem ministers were hugely relishing the experience of being in government. Meanwhile the rump of Mr Clegg's party was thoroughly miserable and it would be easy to see them splitting off, perhaps under the leftish deputy leader, Simon Hughes.

In short, there are big hitters in both coalition parties who think that the era of one party rule in Britain may well be over, at least for the Tories. It is fair to say that an awful lot of MPs and certainly party members accept nothing of the sort. They would probably accuse Mr Boles of being an outrageous opportunist, seizing his chance to steer the Conservative party onto a centrist, liberal-conservative course that was his dream all along. Perhaps they are right that Mr Boles is an opportunist. I would venture that a more interesting question is whether Mr Boles and his fellow Cameroons are right or wrong that an earthquake and floods are imminent. If they are right, then radical change will not be a question of choice or ideological preference. It will be a matter of survival.