Tory right on the rise

Trouble with a spin doctor and now a cabinet minister, a summer of riots and an economy on the critical list: you might imagine that David Cameron would be plummeting in the polls. Not a bit of it. The Conservatives are doing rather better than they were in the summer, only a point or two behind Labour now. Just like Tony Blair before him, Cameron seems Teflon-coated.

Comparisons between Cameron and Blair are unavoidable. Blair in power quickly disappointed and then angered leftwing and traditional Labourites, just as Cameron is disappointing the Tory right. Cameron did not much rate Liam Fox but gave him a top job because he did not want to confront the right. It sounds like Blair's appointment of Frank Dobson as health secretary, a bone to keep traditional Labourites quiet.

Cameron in Libya, like Blair in Kosovo, has had a "good war" early on. At a deeper level, both entered office in times of austerity. Blair and Cameron both felt they could effectively ignore the opposition, exhausted and discredited after a long period in government and struggling to define itself in a new era. There are other points of comparison the instinct for PR moments, the actorly frown and catch in the voice, the appealing family pictures but these are the essential ones. The question is, what might this parallel in recent history tell us about the future?

Today's story is that Cameron is almost untouchably strong. He has been made more powerful by Fox's resignation, rather than weakened by it. An "aw, shucks" semi-apologetic shrug seems to have let him off the Coulson and Murdoch affair, which might have destroyed a weaker prime minister. As to the opposition, Ed Miliband's Labour party isn't collapsing, like the Tory party of William Hague and his successors, yet nor is it breaking through. But I think the signs from here on are more ominous for Cameron.

First, though Blair and Brown had tough choices to make on the economy early on, the upswing was on the way. Blair, like Cameron, always sold himself as a sunny, optimistic leader, offering better times ahead. The difference was that there were good times ahead, so that by the 2001 election the "Blair-Brown boom" was becoming visible. It may have been built on debt and a financial sector going quietly astray, but they enjoyed 40 successive quarters of economic growth.

Blair's dodgy dealings and the various political scandals were tolerated, even laughed about, by the wider public because life was good and getting better.

Cameron and Osborne face a very different future, with less leeway. Unless the Bank of England, the OECD and most reputable economists are all wrong, we face very hard times ahead and for a long time to come.

Yet the complacency that afflicted New Labour is now being repeated by a new government that will face a far angrier public. The spectacle of private lobbying deals and inner circles within circles, clear in the Fox story, is even more dangerous than scandals in the early Blair years, because of the surrounding economics. Cameron has to act very fast when Gus O'Donnell's report comes out this week.

This means that the threat posed by the Tory right to the personal authority of the prime minister is likely to be greater than the threat ever posed by the left to Blair. Why? Because Blair was going with the grain of good times, and the left never had much purchase against him until the Iraq war.

The Tory right, however, does have some sort of answer to the economic troubles ahead. Its old policies of tax-cutting and getting out of Europe will be more appealing to Conservative MPs as the euro bloc gets into deeper trouble and unemployment at home keeps rising. It may not be Fox or David Davis who leads the right from the backbenches, but there are plenty of brighter young MPs who may take up the flag.

To succeed, Cameron will need to shed his image as an appeaser, as a party manager, and take up issues such as our continued involvement in the EU more directly or lose the arguments.

And he is going to have to do far more to show that he is not just another establishment stooge. Cameron remains an enigma, just as Blair was for a while, and it may be that he can make this transition. He should enjoy this time, when he seems able to drift above the fray, untouched by errors of judgment, cronyism and scandal. It won't last long.