As Labour implodes Cameron turns right

THE implosion of New Labour would be spectacular enough on its own. A party built on discipline is succumbing to internal warfare, neither Gordon Brown nor Tony Blair will budge and their low-level feuding will dominate coming months.

As the New Labour coalition is visibly falling apart, we see a new Conservative coalition being put together. As Blair is losing touch with the public mood, David Cameron is increasingly proving himself able to judge it.

As Brown and Blair both look unable to piece together the increasingly fractious Labour party, Cameron is consolidating his hold over the Tories and earning the respect of factions which once mistrusted him. It is an extraordinary sight to behold.

When Cameron was elected, there were many who viewed him with the utmost suspicion. Here, it seemed, was a public relations man who looked like he had come to lobotomise conservatism, not to rescue it.

Labour also looked on, knowingly. After the young leader had his honeymoon, it was predicted, his party would revert to type and eat him alive. Disloyalty, Labour believed, is in the DNA of Conservatives.

Historically, the reverse is true. Labour has been a divided party since its inception: it took several election defeats and all the energies of Neil Kinnock to introduce the discipline which Blair managed to keep going for 10 years of his leadership.

Now, the two parties are swinging back to their traditional roles. The Conservatives are being united by the will to win and Cameron, in the local elections a fortnight ago, has shown them that they can. Hunger for power is the ultimate adhesive.

Cameron is finally starting to address the issues the Tory right find important. Last week, for example, he declared he would tear up the Human Rights Act if it cannot be reformed - repeating one of Michael Howard's more controversial election policies.

From Howard, it seemed vaguely sinister. But from Cameron, it seems to be common sense - especially in a week where nine Afghans who hijacked an aircraft to arrive in London were saved from deportation to protect their human rights.

In the first few months of his leadership, Cameron hid from such themes and spoke only of counter-cultural issues. Now he is finding the confidence to attack Blair from the right, in a way that does not leave him exposed to the ridicule heaped on Howard.

John Redwood, who is as uncompromising a tax-cutter as you could hope to meet in Westminster, declares himself proud to be a Cameron Conservative and is sure that he will get round to tax cuts. There is no sign of the predicted Tory split.

Next was Cameron's speech denouncing the premature sexualisation of children by the fashion industry: a theme which has huge resonance with Middle Britain parents repelled by seeing FCUK on the high street. It was a brilliantly chosen theme.

Now ask whether Brown would have thought of this, and how it would come across if he attempted the same speech. It would have come across as a statistics-laden threat to the retail sector, not the voice of a father sharing a common concern.

Consider Cameron's two speeches and then the words of John Denham, a Labour backbencher, last week. "Blair used to have a paranormal instinct for the fears and the mood of the British people, but that has faded." Might Cameron have this gift?

It is too early to tell but both interventions last week showed assured judgment. At a time when Labour is talking to itself, Cameron is voicing the concerns of Britain: exactly the image he needs to convey as Labour civil war continues.

The Leader of the Opposition may never in his life have turned right when stepping on to a jumbo jet, but for all the privilege of his background he finds it easier than Brown to project himself as a normal guy with whom voters can identify.

He is discovering a weapon against Brown. It is hard to summon a mental image of the Chancellor doing anything except plotting. His tour of television studios in the last week, busy on his mission to destabilise the Prime Minister, showed his weakness.

No matter how hard Brown tries, he cannot ditch his image as a political machine. His attempts to normalise his speaking style have failed: he still grins in the wrong parts of sentences and seems to use the vocabulary of a Budget text.

Brown's greatest enemy in politics is the microphone. The more exposure he is given on the radio and television, and the more he ignores interview questions and bores listeners to death, the better Cameron will look by comparison.

It used to be the Tories whose leaders looked a bit weird: the kind of people you would not want to have a pint with. Now Cameron has become the first Tory leader with a higher approval rating than Blair. On this front, the Tories have the edge.

It is also worth adding Sir Menzies Campbell to the equation. His dire performances at Prime Minister's Question Time are deeply embarrassing the Liberal Democrats who see their leader read the question from a piece of paper.

He is a former advocate, who turns 65 next week: the embodiment of experience. Yet the Lib Dems say they are now training him how to ask a question of the Prime Minister. It is too late for them to issue a product recall on their new leader.

This matters because rising Lib Dem stars are to the right of the party, and they privately admit how impressed they are with Cameron. Such dynamics make a Tory-Lib Dem coalition far more likely in a hung parliament.

While things are coming together for the Conservatives, they are falling apart for Labour. Brown, a world-class schemer, has made a fatal misjudgment: that he can stir up a rebellion against the party leader and expect loyalty when he takes the helm.

A random episode of BBC1's Question Time shows how Labour supporters have turned against their party. Sex scandal, venality: all the traits they hated in John Major's Conservatives are plenty evident in Blair's government.

And will dour old Brown, who failed to keep Dunfermline & Fife West in Labour hands, revitalise the party? The rebels whom he employs to demand the Prime Minister's early exit certainly think not, and are preparing to oppose him too.

A demoralised core vote and a split party are prerequisites for losing power. An ability to talk to suburban Britain, which decides British elections, is a prerequisite to winning. The Conservatives are gradually ending up on the right side of this equation.