Gerald Warner: 'Blair's heir' finally finds his true place in the party of Peel

LAST week an event occurred that had great political significance. Amid the frenzy of plummeting markets, collapsing banks and the confrontation in America between Wall Street and Main Street at the climacteric of a presidential election, there came a portentous moment in our domestic politics: David Cameron became the leader of the Tory Party.

You might ask: did that not happen almost three years ago? No, in reality, it did not. Being elected to the leadership is one thing; being taken to the bosom of the Conservative Party is quite a different matter. Edward Heath was not only party leader, he governed in the name of Conservatism for four years; but he never won the heart, confidence or trust of his party. In that sense, he was never truly a Tory leader.

Something of the same alienation – though never as toxic as that of Heath – attached to Cameron, despite his success in the polls. Even electoral success is not guaranteed to seal the covenant between the Tory leader and the faithful: Heath won a general election, after all, which Cameron has not yet done. The Tories are a close-knit tribe. Their fetishes and taboos are complex and inscrutable to outsiders – on occasion even to some of the tribal elders. At recent party conferences the faithful have had to sit, stony-faced, while certain of those elders defiled their most sacred totems. Theresa May, in her notorious rant at the 2005 conference, berated the dedicated men and women in her captive audience who had sacrificed a week's work to attend this masochistic event. "Don't think you'll find a refuge from the modern world here," the kitten-heeled harridan scolded her employers. "There is no place for you in our (sic) Conservative Party." Francis Maude is another foreign body within the Tory Party; like May, with his modernising obsessions, he remains intrinsically alien. The influence of these deranged innovators, infected with the brain disease Portillista modernensis, was the greatest single threat to Cameron's credibility.

At the 2006 Tory conference we saw 'Dave', in his 'Heir of Blair' phase, indulging in verbal gymnastics of the most clownish – and dangerously alienating – kind: "There's something special about marriage… It's about commitment"… His audience nearly succumbed to premature standing ovation, just before he added: "And by the way, it means something whether you're a man and a woman, a woman and a woman or a man and another man." Could Rowan Williams have produced a more nonsensical piece of moral Poujadism?

During the brief period when Cameron's leadership of the opposition overlapped with Tony Blair's dying premiership, both the Tories and Labour were led by men who were, in varying degrees, foreign to the culture of their parties. Blair was always alien to Labour. Cameron's case was different. Any in-depth analysis of him showed his instincts and intellect were intuitively Tory. Even his Parliamentary voting record was socially conservative. Yet he had become persuaded he must deny his core beliefs to make his party electable. Imitating Blair had become a mania with the Conservative high command. Now, events have finally liberated the Tories.

The Islington/Notting Hill passion for "social liberalism" was a trendy luxury of the days of plenty. Today, in an era of house repossessions, rising unemployment and financial insecurity, all that hug-a-hoodie, close-a-grammar-school buffoonery is an electoral liability, not an asset. Crisis has concentrated the minds of the Tory leader and the electorate alike.

So, in Birmingham last Wednesday, Cameron and his party finally became as one. Without appearing to do so, by illustration rather than rhetoric, he contrived to make a deeply philosophical speech. He denounced Libertarianism, repudiating the swivel-eyed moral anarchists who have tried to colonise the Conservative Party. Ditto the free-market anarchists: "We are not an anti-state party." Yet he made it clear he would demolish Labour's leviathan state: "It means destroying all those useless quangos and initiatives." He would also sweep away the "health and safety, human rights culture".

On the Union, the NHS, crime, education and the Lisbon Treaty he struck exactly the right note. He gave the kind of specific commitments on cleaning up political sleaze that Gordon Brown has always evaded. He even threw back the "no such thing as society" canard at Labour, in a dramatic excoriation of its bleak, state-centred Arctic night. He invoked Peel, Shaftesbury and Disraeli without becoming affectedly didactic. This was the speech half the country had waited years to hear: the reassertion of Toryism's enduring relevance – the manifesto of our next Prime Minister.