In a set piece interview with Sky – extracts here – he deftly counters the Great Clunking Fist’s accusations that he’s still wet behind the ears, pointing out that for all his experience, Gordon Brown has made rather a hash of things over the last year. There’s even the by now de rigeur sideswipe at New Labour from the left:

I just make this argument: who in the last year has thumped the poor and the working poor with abolishing the 10-pence tax rate? That was an appalling decision taken by a Labour prime minister.

Quite. Welcome to the world of Cameron’s Conservatives; environmentally friendly, socially liberal and completely at ease with multiculturalism. Not the Nasty Party anymore.

This is a development that many on the left are having difficulties in coming to terms with. Most are arguing that the apparent transformation is purely presentational, and that underneath everything, there lurks an unreconstructed Thatcherite authoritarian.

That’s a line I have previously argued myself many times. As a student, I wrote long essays proffering Gramscian analyses of the exact composition of the Thatcherite historic bloc.

As a journalist in the 1990s, I sustained a minor cottage industry in populist denunciations of the Tories as a bunch of reactionary, racist, homophobic, authoritarian, narrow-minded, anti-European, gin-and-Jag belt golf-club bigots. It was easy copy.

And it probably is the case that a large chunk of the rank and file want euroscepticism, they want law and order, they want tougher immigration controls and they want lower taxes. And they want them now.

But I’m starting to suspect that attempts to dismiss Cameron - pictured above - as ‘the same old same old’ are as wide of the mark as the Major government’s laughable initial efforts to brand Blair a closet ‘demon eyes’ socialist back in 1994 and 1995.

Electoral politics can and do reflect demographic changes; New Labour is the living proof of that. Perhaps we shouldn’t too surprised. An ability to move with the times is one of the characteristics that distinguishes a living political organisation from a cult.

The dilemma for Cameron is that there are votes in comfort zone Tory politics. Not enough to win an election, of course. But enough to provide the world’s oldest political party with goodly representation in parliament and plenty of jobs for both MPs and bag-carriers.

On the other hand, the ruling class of the 2000s has different needs than the ruling class of the late 1970s. It doesn’t have to undermine a confident and assertive labour movement, and the game plan of liberalising the British economy, as commenced under Thatcherism, was largely completed under Blair. Ironically, it may now be that the time has come for a certain degree of re-regulation.

The arrival of Cameronism shows is now possible to combine social liberalism with the retention of a core political project of providing a political vehicle for the minority of wealthy people that control society, in a way that could not have been done three decades ago.

In short, the coming Cameron government will of course do lots of execrable and reactionary things that the left will have to oppose. Despite the man’s protestations to be a progressive politician, it is unlikely to do very much that we would regard as progressive.

But there is little I can contemplate him doing that would reopen the deep social polarisation that split British society so deeply in the Thatcher years.

He will have a different mission statement, if only because a different mission statement is required of him. Simply to present the Tory leader as Maggie masquerading as Morrissey would be a mistake.