There’s only one word for the media coverage of ‘Dave’ Cameron: nauseating. The Tory party has been hijacked by a bunch of refugees from Notting Hill. (The press has already dubbed them the Cameroons.) I keep expecting to find Hugh Grant lurking somewhere at the back of the publicity pictures. So it was nice to find some robustly sceptical comment at last — in this case a splendid column by Jonathan Freedland in today’s Guardian. Sample:

Progressives should start telling the media: enough of the infatuation – it’s getting embarrassing. For a “compassionate conservative”, as Cameron styles himself, is not a new creation. We have seen one before – and his name was George Bush.

He too knew how to talk nice — “No child left behind” he promised in 2000, usually surrounded by plenty of telegenic black and female faces – but once he had installed himself in power, he was as ruthless a rightwinger as any Republican in history.

Cameron is no chum of Bush – and the president is unlikely to alienate Blair by getting too cosy with him now – but the parallel is not entirely bogus. For one thing, Cameron too is surrounded by ideological neoconservatives, his campaign manager and shadow chancellor George Osborne chief among them. Cameron strongly backed the Iraq war while his allies, Michael Gove and Ed Vaizey, last month founded the Henry Jackson Society, named after the late US senator who is the patron saint of neoconservatism.

It’s all of a piece with a new Tory leader who wants to look and sound kinder and gentler, but is actually truer and bluer. Europe hardly featured in the leadership contest, but one of Cameron’s few specific promises was to pull his MEPs out of the European People’s Party grouping in the European parliament – leaving them instead to rub along with a few ragtag nationalists and hardliners on the fringes. Even IDS [Iain Duncan-Smith] rejected that move as too batty.

I’ve always thought that the phrase “compassionate conservatism” is an oxymoron, like “military intelligence”.

Fact: The Henry Jackson Society was founded by a group of right-wing academics in Peterhouse, Cambridge. As I understand it, Gove and Vaizey were just early Parliamentary ‘patrons’ of the outfit. I was invited to join (one of the founders is a friend of mine), but gracefully declined, because I was unable to sign up to some of the Society’s key ‘principles’. I could not, for example: “Support the necessary furtherance of European military modernisation and integration under British leadership, preferably within NATO.”

Nice to see also that Simon Hoggart had noticed young Dave’s curious repertoire of hand signals:

There’s the fly fisherman, casting his line, the University Challenge student suddenly hitting the buzzer, and the pinball wizard working his flippers.

That’s more like it. Why, I feel better already.

Whenever someone intelligent seems to be behaving oddly, the hypothesis has to be that they know what they’re doing and that you simply haven’t figured it out. (Sometimes clever people do barmy things, but that’s not the best initial bet.)

So it is with Tony Blair and the Succession. If — as is widely believed — there is some kind of deal between him and Gordon Brown that the latter is the anointed successor, then Blair’s declared intention of serving “a full term” as Prime Minister seems bizarre. If he really wanted Brown to succeed and have a fighting chance of winning the next election, then there must be an orderly transition fairly soon (and certainly no more than 18 months from now). But this is not how Blair — steaming fanatically ahead with his reform-or-bust agenda — is behaving. Why?

Watching Brown in action this week as Adair Turner’s sensible report on the pensions crisis was published, an obvious thought occurred to me (I’m slow on the uptake, alas). It’s this: Blair doesn’t want Brown to succeed him, and he’s going to do everything in his power to stop him becoming leader!

What’s more, he’s right. If Labour goes into the next election with Brown facing David Cameron as the Tory leader, then they will lose.

Several reasons for this prediction. The first is that the closer Brown gets to the limelight the less attractive he looks. He’s a clever but inflexible thinker, and very dogmatic once he has taken up a position. His reaction to the Turner proposals shows this, and he’s determined to sabotage them. As the Bagehot column in this week’s Economist puts it,

Many people are uneasy about the way Mr Brown conducts business, and pensions have brought out the worst in him.

It matters little who leaked a letter last week from the chancellor to Lord Turner, the head of the Pensions Commission that published its long-awaited findings on Wednesday. The letter’s purpose was to cast doubt on Lord Turner’s sums. As everyone in Westminster knows, Mr Brown has been quietly denigrating the commission for more than a year.

He was unhappy from the moment its remit was expanded to include the future of state pensions as well as occupational schemes, although how the one could be considered without the other was never clear. Most recently, through anonymous briefings, he has attacked the affordability of its main proposals. The chancellor has been irked by Lord Turner’s criticism of the way his pet means-tested pension credits discourage saving and he is resentful of the commission’s intrusion on his Treasury turf.

The second reason for thinking that Brown would be an electoral liability is that he looks terrible on television. Of course, this shouldn’t matter, but it does (see Neil Postman’s wonderful book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, for chapter and verse). He’s beginning to look like my maternal grandfather, a solemn businessman who wore a Homburg hat. In four years’ time, this effect will be even more pronounced. And Brown will appear to be even more boring when he appears on television then.

Boredom is the elephant in the room of British politics. The electorate is, in the main, entirely uninterested in politics. It complains about the government, of course, but in the main it is hard to stir up electors on ideological or policy grounds. They put up with the Tories, for example, for 18 years, and eventually threw them out not because the party was intellectually and morally bankrupt (as we pointy-headed intellectuals fondly imagine), but basically because people had become tired of seeing all those old faces trotting out the same old story.

Now spool forward four years to 2009. In the Labour corner will be dull, monotonic, dark-suited, Homburg-hatted Brown rabbitting on about the timing of the economic cycle, the importance of means-tested benefits and how he was right about pensions all along. Yawn, zzzzz…. For the Tories, there will be a young, smooth-talking snake-oil salesman named Cameron. Could this be the nightmare scenario that Blair foresees, and is determined to avoid?