Steve Richards: It is too early to anoint Cameron

The Tory leader is way ahead in the polls, but he's not distinct enough to count on victory

A very significant shift has taken place since the start of the year. There is now a widely held assumption that the Conservatives will win the next election, probably by a substantial majority.

One respected opinion pollster tells me he expects a Conservative landslide. Cabinet ministers privately contemplate a period in opposition. Key Labour strategists are already planning for how their party should respond to defeat. Their discussions include who is best placed to lead them back into power, or at least prevent a descent into eternal opposition.

To cap it all, some of the best political columnists in the land have declared that the game is up. With more than a year to go they conclude that it is all over. David Cameron will be the next Prime Minister ... thank you and good night. The political choreography is rearranged subtly to prepare for a change of government.

Inevitably such a shift feeds on itself. The more Cameron is viewed as an alternative Prime Minister the more he becomes one. The more the government is seen as doomed the more it loses authority.

All of which places me in an odd position. I always work on the assumption that given half a chance England will vote for a Conservative government. Yet at this particular point I sense the politicians and pundits are premature in predicting so confidently the outcome of the next election.

Before I explain why, I should cite the best argument I have heard from some of Labour's senior figures about their plight. Above all, they conclude that it is simply impossible amid such relentless economic gloom for a long-serving Labour government to explain why it is borrowing even more money – cash which will have to be paid back through post-election tax increases. As a result, a victory for the Conservatives is guaranteed.

The first reason why they might be wrong relates to Mr Cameron's leadership. In many ways he has not put a foot wrong in an almost impossible job. I regard him as an oddly underestimated figure. The way he has transformed the image of the Conservative party, without greatly transforming its policies or its personnel, has been an extraordinary achievement. He is as quick-thinking and as witty as Tony Blair when he was in opposition. In some ways he is a warmer, more personable figure.

But he remains too Blair-like as a public figure. Blair had qualities, but his era has been and gone. I sense no clamour for a return. Yet the similarities are so evident that the emulation must be conscious – stylistically and politically.

Cameron's attempt, at the end of last week, to claim his support for a new form of compassionate capitalism was the kind of mood music in reverse that Blair composed in opposition. The claim emerged during the kind of interview – with the writer Will Hutton – which Blair would never have made the mistake of agreeing to in the first place. In the course of it, Hutton exposed forensically the fundamental weakness of Cameron's position – the paucity of the means compared with the counter-intuitive grandeur of the vision.

My point is not one about substance, but one of authenticity. Look back at every election-winning Prime Minister and they have had a distinctive voice. To take a recent sequence, Callaghan was different from Wilson. Thatcher stood out for obvious reasons. Major was a recognisably different creature from Thatcher. Blair was a one-off. Or was he?

In its glitzy, headline-grabbing celebration of safe, tiny incremental objectives, the event that was due to take place at a south London school yesterday, in which Cameron was joining the former Countdown host Carol Vorderman and pledging to raise standards in maths, was another echo of Blair in opposition.

So was the recent shadow cabinet reshuffle in which those engaged in supposedly important policy detail were moved for reasons of symbolism (the tough Chris Grayling, working away on welfare reform, was switched to shadow home affairs). Cameron has not yet acquired a public voice that is distinct from Blair's and New Labour's strategy for winning elections. He would be breaking a prime ministerial pattern if he were to win on this basis.

My second reason for doubts about the outcome relates to the Conservatives' reaction to the economic crisis. Politically they have all the best lines, as Margaret Thatcher did in the run-up to the 1979 election. Indeed Cameron repeats a lot of Thatcherite lines about the need for a country to live within its means.

But Thatcher was reflecting and shaping the zeitgeist of the late 1970s. Now distinguished economists from across the political spectrum are baffled at the Conservatives' current position and their apparent failure to understand that this crisis is very different from the recession in Britain in 1981. Out of conviction as well as expediency, the Conservatives have opted to march alone against the new zeitgeist. But it does mean that they are not part of the global "sea change" that Callaghan recognised was blowing him out of power in 1979. They sail against the gale force winds.

The third reason relates to the unpredictability of the crisis, which has already led to a new set of widely held assumptions about the role of markets and the state. I will be surprised if the demand is for the government to do less by the time of the next election, and it could already be doing a lot more, including owning more banks.

The fourth reason has to do with Brown's wildly oscillating political career. My shelves creak with articles that have written him off at various points since 1994. Maybe this time everyone is right, but his resilience and admittedly erratic cunning remain underestimated factors.

Probably none of these reasons will counter the voters' desire to punish a long-serving, tired and flawed government. But they might. The election is still a long way off, and between now and then, an epoch-changing crisis rages.

s.richards@independent.co.uk