David Cameron has in a matter of weeks emerged from virtual obscurity outside the Westminster village to become the heir apparent to the Conservative throne. It is difficult not to be perplexed when one looks for the substance behind this rise. His lack of political experience and ideological unerpinnings lead to the conclusion that Cameron has been anointed as the Tory chosen one merely on the basis of a media image which is potentially attractive to the floating voter.

David Aaronovitch in yesterday's Times attempted to tackle this analysis by hunting out the substance behind the Cameron image. Aaronovitch seemed to get some solace from this exercise, but to me it seemed to confirm the suspicion that the Tories see in Cameron nothing more or less than the second coming of Tony Blair.

Among the meagre crumbs of comfort put forward by Aaronovitch are the following:-

The Boy David wants to continue the expansion of higher education, not the contraction back to “proper university courses” so beloved of many on the Right and not a few on the Left. To fund that expansion he wants the Conservatives to support, and even extend, variable top-up fees. Public service spending comes before any tax-cutting imperative: “We will never get good schools, universities, hospitals, transport or police on the cheap.” The key is reform. Reform in the shape of co-payment, where Cameron endorses road pricing as a way to deal with congestion, and in “good ideas like Foundation Hospitals and City Academies”, which Labour failed to press ahead with because of their own party’s conservatism.

So, the Cameron strategy of opposition with regard to public service provision would seem to be to criticise the Labour party for not being Blairite enough. What is needed, this would seem to imply, is for Blairism to migrate to its natural home: a David Cameron-led Conservative party in opposition to a Gordon Brown-led Labour party.

Aaronovitch's attempt to substantiate the Cameron world-view continues with his reaction to the War in Iraq.

By August this year, and with the Iraq war less popular than ever, Cameron made a speech to the Foreign Policy Centre. Before the war started, he said: “I had my concerns about the scale of what is being attempted.” He preferred deterrence to pre-emption, multilateralism to unilateral action, and was worried about the chances of success.

Then comes a passage of analysis about the global threat that might have been written by Paul Wolfowitz or Tony Blair, rather than Douglas Hurd or Ken Clarke. “Jihadism,” Cameron said, “feeds into the bewilderment, alienation and lack of progress felt by many in the Muslim world. The corruption of many states in the Middle East. The lack of democracy. The concentration of power in the hands of elites whose lifestyles are noticeably un-Islamic.” In other words, until those regimes are democratised, we will always be at risk from fundamentalism. So, we in Britain, “share a responsibility . . . to promote change, reform and liberalisation”.

Cameron, in his own write, is a reforming neocon. Here’s a passage worth quoting to anyone who says they don’t know who he is. “Just as there were figures in the 1930s who misunderstood the totalitarian wickedness of Nazism and argued that Hitler had a rational set of limited political demands, so there are people today who try to explain jihadist violence with reference to a limited set of political goals. If only, some argue, we withdrew from Iraq, or Israel made massive concessions, then we would assuage jihadist anger. That argument . . . is as limited as the belief in the 1930s that, by allowing Germany to remilitarise the Rhineland or take over the Sudetenland, we would satisfy Nazi ambitions. A willingness to cede ground and duck confrontation is interpreted as fatal weakness.”

If this makes David Cameron a neocon, then does it not also make IDS, Michael Howard, and for that matter Tony Blair, neocons as well? Cameron, like many Tories and not a few Labour MPs, happened to support the Iraq War. The last time I checked, supporting one conflict did not define Neoconservatism. I have a feeling that David Davis would fit the neocon bill just as well if not better than Cameron.

Aaronovitch's attempts to put some skin on the bones of Cameron's political ideology are fruitless and beside the point. The Conservative Party would appear to have reached the same point as Labour in the early '90s, where pride and belief in the efficacy of past policies have been replaced with a predominant view that if you can't beat them, you need to find a way to join them. One can expect under Cameron a similar focus group-influenced search for the right package of image and policies to recapture the middle ground from Labour. Ideology will be replaced with expediency as the Conservatives attempt to learn the lessons from the Labour media machine.

The question remains whether Cameron and co. will be able to match the incisiveness and drive achieved by New Labour. Tony Blair had considerably more experience on the front bench than Cameron when he came to lead his party, and although the Tories currently appear more unified and motivated than they have since the '80s Thatcher era, Cameron will need to maintain the loyalty of the right-wing of the party, just as New Labour managed with the Left-wingers, in exchange for a serious tilt at Government.