David Cameron was good at politics once – he got under Tony Blair’s skin

The new foreign secretary was the only rival who succeeded in needling Blair, writes John Rentoul

Cameron set out deliberately to learn from Blair in order to beat him (PA)

Tony Blair was effortlessly dismissive of the five Conservative leaders he faced across the House of Commons. “I defined Major as weak; Hague as better at jokes than judgement; Howard as an opportunist; Cameron as a flip-flop, not knowing where he wanted to go.”

He said he didn’t bother with Iain Duncan Smith, because “the Tories did my work for me” in undermining him. These observations open one of the finest passages of Blair’s memoir, A Journey, in which he reflects on the effectiveness of different styles of debate.

His attacks on Tory leaders, he admitted, seem “flat” and “mundane”, but they were more effective than “calling your opponent a liar, or a fraud, or a villain or a hypocrite”. Those insults are too heavy for the “middle-ground floating voter”, whereas the lesser charge, “because it’s more accurate and precisely because it’s more low-key, can stick”.

There was another reason that Blair got the better of the first four of his opponents, which is that they fell into the trap set for them. In each case, Blair set himself up as the owner of the centre ground and defended the territory with such tenacity that his opponents were forced into positions that the voters regarded as extreme.

John Major tried to contest the centre ground, but his party wouldn’t let him. He was reduced to replacing a party election broadcast during the 1997 campaign with a video of him pleading with Tory candidates not to “bind my hands” on the issue of a European single currency.

William Hague started off trying to be a centrist, but ended up calling on the voters to “save the pound” from the back of a flat-bed truck, when the voters could see that the Labour government was a long way from adopting the euro.

IDS hardly bothered with the centre ground, after a cursory pitch for a Christian social mission on the poverty-stricken estates of Glasgow. He adopted a more hawkish pose on Iraq than Blair, at a time when public opinion was queasy, but as Blair said, the Tory party did his work for him.

Michael Howard was a trickier opponent, but fell into the trap all the same. “If Michael had backed me over tuition fees,” Blair wrote in his memoir, “it would have done me real damage with my own side; done him a power of good with sensible, informed opinion; and not changed the result. But he didn’t.”

It was not until David Cameron came along that the Conservatives finally started to get to grips with Blair. Cameron had a trial run as shadow education secretary, where he made life impossible for Ruth Kelly, Blair’s education secretary. His tactic was devastatingly simple: he supported her. She had been asked by Blair to bring in a new round of schools reforms, giving schools more independence from local authorities, in a bill that was wildly unpopular with most Labour MPs.

As Kelly began the long process of ripping out everything controversial from the bill, Cameron saw his chance. He offered Tory votes to help get the bill through parliament so that Kelly and Blair wouldn’t have to dilute the legislation.

In the end, the bill was diluted to homoeopathic levels, and Blair pursued his schools policy through the academies programme instead. But the effect of Cameron’s positioning, which he continued after he was elected Tory leader in December 2005, was to embarrass Blair for the first time as prime minister.

Cameron had a Blairite knack for that. His first sound bite at Prime Minister’s Questions – “he was the future once” – was a brilliant example of the art of duffing up your opponent, even before Blair had written about it in his book. It was plain, unadorned, rather oblique. I thought at the time it was a feeble line, but it brilliantly defined Blair as past his time. The secret of it was that it chimed with what Blair’s own party thought of him.

Cameron had the huge advantage, for a Conservative, of recognising that Blair was a formidable opponent – rather than, as his predecessors had been tempted to think, a charlatan who had got lucky. Cameron and George Osborne called Blair “The Master” and set out deliberately to learn from him in order to beat him.

Some of the commentary on Cameron’s return to the cabinet has compared it to Peter Mandelson’s comeback in 2008. But one similarity has been overlooked: that Lord Mandelson and Lord Cameron are both good at politics. Lord Mandelson reinforced Gordon Brown’s operation, bringing strategic stability to Brown’s tendency to allow his political skills to be distracted by micro-management.

The question about Lord Cameron’s return is whether he can bring that kind of political perspective to Rishi Sunak’s technocratic tendencies.