Just before David Cameron won the Conservative party leadership contest in December 2005, he claimed, ‘I’m certainly a big Thatcher fan, but I don’t know whether that makes me a Thatcherite.’ To some sympathetic observers this was more than characteristically clever political positioning. To them, Cameron was genuinely striving for a new synthesis – a Tory equivalent to New Labour’s claim to combine social justice with economic efficiency and environmental sustainability. As such, Cameron’s genius lay in his ability to convey admiration for an iconic leader without seeming in thrall to her. Margaret Thatcher’s three governments had apparently saved the British economy from becoming a basket case. But the challenges in an era of non-inflationary continuous expansion (remember that?) were now more social than economic. The agenda had changed and the narrative needed to do so, too. The party – respectfully but rightly – was finally moving on.

Others were equally keen that the modernisers should take over but were rather more sceptical. The Times columnist and former Tory MP Matthew Parris, for instance, wondered whether Cameron and George Osborne might not be the perfect ‘useful idiots, putting a caring and optimistic face on the old Tory dog’- a timeless beast that ‘distrusts whiz-bang politics’ and is ‘eternally sceptical of government schemes for the improvement of humanity’, a beast which ‘thinks the apparatus of state will absorb as much gold as you throw at it, and still cry for more’, that ‘people do not like to pay taxes’, that ‘politics is not only about renaissance and reform, but also about the clash of interests, and that you can’t please everybody.’

Now the Conservatives have been in office for a year, and can therefore be judged by their deeds and not just their words, this world-weary view seems more persuasive than the more postmodern take it sought to undermine. On the other hand, we have no way of knowing for sure whether the Cameron we see now is the Cameron we would have seen had he become prime minister in a rather more benign economic environment. The politics of recession and deficit-reduction, after all, is inevitably a zero-sum game. It is too easy to compare and contrast the current Conservative administration with those which governed when things were so much easier. The long boom that followed the second world war meant that the choices faced by Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home were simply nowhere near as hard as those that faced Thatcher and John Major and which now face Cameron.

The man missing from the list above is Ted Heath. Like both Thatcher and Cameron after him, his elevation to the leadership some five years before he became prime minister was widely trumpeted as a breath of fresh air. When he, like them, won a spring general election, he too hit the ground running: taxes were cut and restructured; there was massive reform of the health service; the talk was tough and all about a new era. When, however, things began to go wrong, and unemployment and inflation went up instead of down, Heath decided to follow his postwar predecessors and prioritise jobs and growth or, as his critics saw it, chose to sacrifice the long for the short term.

That decision – in no small part because the gamble it entailed failed to pay off either economically or electorally – left a permanent scar on the Conservative party. But it also produced a revelation. Both help explain why Thatcher and Major acted as they did, and why Cameron has acted as he has done since May 2010. Not only has every Tory prime minister since Heath been determined never to execute a U-turn, they have also realised that it is perceived incompetence and inconsistency, rather than mass unemployment and erratic or anaemic growth, which will lose them elections. Given that collective mindset, Cameron’s insistence on cutting as far and as fast as possible is wholly predictable.

That’s not to say that there is no ideology involved. Those who argue that Cameron is keen not to waste a good crisis also have a point. Thatcher re-imported and re-emphasised the Gladstonian rectitude that her party – having chosen to highlight the Disraelian side of its tradition in order to persuade postwar voters to trust it with the welfare state – seemed temporarily to have forgotten. Major may have tried a change of tone but never a change of gear. And Cameron, while he could plausibly claim to be a ‘one-nation’ Conservative, is one in the tradition not of Benjamin Disraeli, but of Iain Macleod and Enoch Powell: hard-headed, believing in a tax-funded welfare system but only one which operates where the market inevitably fails and which must never give rise to a state so big that it saps the productive capacity, the moral fibre and the community spirit of those for whom it provides a safety net of last resort.

Where Cameron differs from all his postwar predecessors, of course, is that he is having to govern in coalition. Many on the right of the Conservative party even claim that the deal with the Liberal Democrats has dragged the government to the left. But this is surely to view the last year through a hopelessly partisan prism. To those outside the party (and even for some within it) it is hard to identify much of significance that the Conservatives have either been prevented from, or forced into, doing by Nick Clegg and co. Many of the pledges they decided to dump overboard or kick into the long grass were unrealistic anyway, not least on Europe. On other signature issues, like deficit-reduction, immigration, and the retention of Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent, they were not forced into anything resembling a real retreat. Nor, incredibly, did they have to surrender any of the big offices of state to the Liberal Democrats, who – if poll ratings and local election results are anything to go by – seem to have assumed the role of lightning rod.

There is perhaps a danger that, in getting together with Clegg, Cameron risks contracting out (and therefore losing sight of) the progressive, liberal Conservatism that he tried to tap into both before and after his ‘rebalancing’ of the Tory offer from late 2007 onwards to include tougher talk on tax, spending and immigration. But that will be a small price to pay if, in the medium- to long-term, he effectively destroys the Liberal Democrats as a third force in British politics.

Ironically, this also means that there may be less opportunity for Labour to outflank the Tories than might otherwise have been the case. Make no mistake: the cuts in public spending and the economy’s failure to thrive may represent, at least to some people, a disaster, but they are Ed Miliband’s best hope of making it into No 10 at the first (and possibly the only) time of asking. The bulk of British voters are still very much centrists or slightly to the left-of-centre when it comes to such issues. But those same voters remain some way off to the right when it comes to crime and punishment, welfare abuse and immigration. It would have been nice had Cameron’s Conservatives, blessed with an overall majority, chosen to reach out to the educated middle classes by moving in a small ‘l’ liberal direction on such issues, thereby allowing Labour to harden its stance, and reap the benefits. No such luck, I’m afraid.

Still, as long as Labour avoids doing what it did in the 1980s – merely bleating about all the terrible things the Tories supposedly love to do to jobs and services rather than actually coming up with a convincing alternative – it still stands a chance when, sooner or later, Cameron is called to account.