Magical mystery tour: David Cameron and the need for nastiness.

IN a New York Times column on the forthcoming struggle for the shrunken soul of the GOP between "reformers" and "traditionalists," David Brooks threw out the line that reformers "tend to be intrigued by the way David Cameron has modernized the British Conservative Party."

This instantly became conventional wisdom. That was partly because it fit the ideological needs of GOP "reformers" very conveniently. But it must also be said that the ground had been well prepared for it. Michael Gerson of the Washington Post op-ed page had visited London in March 2008 as the guest of (jointly) Tim Montgomerie's influential Tory website www.conservativehome.com and the Centre for Social Justice, headed by former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith. Gerson returned critical of the Tories' weakness on foreign policy and "life" issues, but his overall response was enthusiastic: He had seen "the reincarnation of compassionate conservatism" in Tory social policy, praise be, and he duly cited Cameron and Smith as the very models of a moderate conservatism that the GOP might imitate.

In August, Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard visited London, also as a guest of Montgomerie's website, and was given generous access to leading "Cameroons" such as shadow finance minister George Osborne and senior media guru Steve Hilton. Like Gerson, Barnes gave a balanced critique of the Cameron project: It was strong on social reform, timid on economics and foreign policy, and vague on much else. But he largely swallowed the Cameron "narrative" that underpins and justifies the project.

This narrative divides history into two periods: In the years BC (Before Cameron), the Tories had clung to a narrow and mean-minded traditionalism, repellent to hip, tolerant modern Britain, and campaigned solely on the "core issues" of Europe, immigration, and tax cuts. Accordingly they lost the watershed 1997 election to Blair's New Labour and went on to lose the next two elections as well. In the years AD (After Dave), however, they have embraced "diversity," social change, global warning, etc. Having thus "detoxified" or "decontaminated" the Tory brand image, they now look like winning the next election. Republicans, take note of this bold modernizing, etc., etc.

But is this conventional wisdom, well, true? Consider, first, its gloomy account of the period BC.

The narrative vastly exaggerates the Tory party's collapse from 1997 to 2006. Admittedly, the party was justly unpopular after the disastrous (but moderate and Europhiliac) Major administration. It needed time for the voters to forget. Many leading Tories, whose only prior experience in politics was of Thatcherite dominance, did not understand this elementary electoral truth. They went hysterical, wailing that they were out of power forever, speculating that conservatism was impossible in modern society.

In fact the bedrock Tory vote stood up pretty well. The Tories hovered around 32 percent in the elections of 1997, 2001, and 2005--which may sound terrible but is normal for the losing party in a two-and-a-half party system like Britain's. Labour won the last election with only 36 percent of the popular vote--just three points ahead of the Tories. When Labour had its own losing streak in the 1980s, its share of the vote fell to 27 percent. So a Tory recovery when Blair was gone and Major finally forgotten was always a likely outcome.