LONDON: Question: what’s the difference between David Cameron (a contender for the Conservative party leadership) and Tony Blair? Answer: 13 years. Every upbeat, feel good word that Cameron utters, every media-savvy move that his spin doctors make, is testament to the way that Blair has transformed British politics — as much in his decade as Margaret Thatcher did in hers. And the content is quite similar too: New Blair with added Euroscepticism. Welcome to the age of Mr Camerair.

Take that inspiring Conservative party conference speech with which David Cameron launched himself like a rocket from Cape Canaveral. I’ve spent a fair bit of time over the past few years reading Blair speeches. They have an unmistakeable look on the page:

Very short sentences.

Large gaps between each line.

I care passionately about this.

We must do that.

Self-deprecating joke.

Guy-on-the-street anecdote.

List of past failures.

Visions of future success!

Sentences without verbs.

Now I download Cameron’s conference speech from his zippy website and, yes, it’s a Blair. It has exactly the same look on the page, the same syntax of exhortation. Cameron speaks like a thoroughly modern private school headmaster, giving the boys a pep talk. Like Blair, he’s not afraid of the word ‘I’, nor of going over the top in missionary mode: “I love my country. I love our character. I love our people, our history, our role in the world.” He, too, can make the higher nonsense sound like sense: “The Conservative party is the only party that wants everybody to be a somebody, a doer not a done-for.”

Hang on, so who exactly do Labour and the Lib Dems want to be a nobody?

Never mind, it makes the audience feel good, a purpose he frankly confesses two sentences later: “I want people to feel good about being a Conservative again.”

Then there’s the characteristic Blair shock-list of statistics: “When one fifth of children leave primary school unable to write properly. When one million schoolchildren play truant each year.” And so on. The verb-to-sentence ratio is slightly higher than in early Blair, but here again are the verbless wonders. “To give choice to parents. Freedom to schools.” This follows a passage about raising standards of literacy. (New Tories, new grammar: “No, Belinda, a sentence does not need to have a subject, a verb and an object. A sentence needs a subject, an object and a spin.”) And his heart bleeds on his sleeve for Darfur and sub-Saharan Africa. At the end comes the rebranding: Modern Compassionate Conservatism, all with initial capitals. Or MCC for short.

For today’s crossbreed of Blair and Cameron, the New Statesman has got there before me, entitling a piece by the sharp-penned Nick Cohen, The birth of Blameron. I prefer my version, Camerair, since it also hints at the essential mixture of television cameras and hot air. It’s so characteristic that Cameron’s years of experience in the ‘real world’ of business were in a media company, Carlton Communications.

Camerairism reflects a structural change more profound than any other ever did. After the great ideological struggles of the 20th century, when communism and fascism were serious competitors to more or less liberal democracy, politics in most advanced industrial democracies is no longer about systemic alternatives. It’s about variants of democratic capitalism. In Britain, in particular, it’s more like a competition between two rival management teams, trying to convince shareholders that they are best suited to run UK plc. After NLNB (New Labour, New Britain), here’s a bid from MCC.

Camerairism also invites us to reflect on the resilience of the ruling classes. If Cameron gets the job, both major parties will — until Blair’s promised departure — be run by upper middle-class public schoolboys, many of whose close advisers share similar backgrounds.

“The new comes back,” as an old east European saying has it. MCC stands for Modern Compassionate Conservatism. It’s also the acronym of one of England’s most tradition-conscious cricket clubs. Old and new are artfully combined. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service