New Labour's warmongering and sleaze-ridden march to the right continues unabated. The Blair administration is deeply unpopular on a range of issues from the war to the NHS and pensions. All this should add up to a golden opportunity for the Tories at the next election. But will it?
In reality the Tories still have a mountain to climb. True, Cameron is less nasty than Michael Howard but so is most of humanity.
It is also true that since his election as Tory Leader in December 2005 - after the third Conservative election defeat - the opinion poll ratings of the party have improved.
In fact the Tories had crept ahead in the polls by January 2006, and have increased their lead in the past 14 months. An ICM survey in early March 2007 put the Tories on 40 per cent and Labour on 29 per cent - a lead of 11 per cent.
This is not surprising given that Blair is deeply damaged and his administration extremely unpopular, but it is till not enough to guarantee an election victory.
The Lib Dems are stuck on 21 per cent and unable to capitalise on the situation. Their shift to the right under Campbell has come at an electoral cost, and they are squeezed by Cameron's attempt to present himselfas a liberal Tory
The first problem the Tories and the Lib Dems face is the tactical situation New Labour has created, with the changeover to Brown imminent - New Labour's plan B.
Blair will resign soon, in all likelihood just after the May elections with the election for his successor completed by July.
This impending departure means that it is less of a problem if current initiatives are unpopular, so long as they are identified with Blair personally.
He can take the flack for the politics and policies of new Labour: cash for peerages, the war, the attack on the public sector, Trident replacement A toff with a right wing past: can Tory leopard change its spots? etc - and then step aside. Brown can then present himself as a new broom and give the impression of a new direction.
We can expect a rash of new eye-catching initiatives - constitutional reforms for example - in Brown's first 100 days. Whatever he pulls out of the hat will be designed to make an impact without in any way diverting from the core neoliberal direction of the new Labour project.
The big question is whether
Barack Obama of course has opposed the war from the beginning and is using his election campaign to call for talks with Iran
Steel argues that Brown has the chance to follow the USA but this time towards peace rather than towards war.
Whatever Brown does, even withdraw from Iraq, it will not be easy for New Labour to regain credibility after everything he and Blair have presided over - most importantly the war. But it could be effective in electoral terms at least in the short term.
And apparently there is already a team working on an image makeover in an attempt to get rid of all that jaw-dropping and his spooky forced grin.
All this means that opinion poll results in the current situation, before the transfer of power, and without the impact (or otherwise) of Brown's first 100 days, are close to meaningless as a guide to the next general election.
If Brown faced a strong Parliamentary opposition the plan B would not work. But he doesn't. He faces a Tory party that has still not fully recovered from the deeply discrediting legacy of Thatcherism which nearly destroyed them, and which eventually swept New Labour into office.
Since then the Tories have not known what to do about Blairism. Michael Howard tried to outflank it to the right and found it impossible to