Alan Watkins: This sea-change is a gift for the Tories

Towards the end of the 1979 election campaign, James Callaghan turned to his young advisor Bernard (later Lord) Donoughue and said: "You know, there are times, perhaps once every 30 years, when there is a sea-change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of. I suspect there is now such a sea-change – and it is for Mrs Thatcher."

Is there a similar change for Mr David Cameron? There have been such shifts before: not only in 1979, but in 1945, 1964 and 1992. I choose the year of our ejection from the European Monetary System as crucial. Others might nominate the election of Mr Tony Blair as leader or his comprehensive triumph in the general election three years later on.

There is an element of artificiality, of contrivance, about most of these attempts to impose a pattern upon the past. In the early 1960s, for instance, it was generally assumed that Tory England was at an end, for the time being at any rate, and that Harold Wilson would carry all before him. As things turned out, Wilson won, but only just. Nor was there any feeling of inevitability in 1978 about Margaret Thatcher's success, when she had already been leading the opposition for three long years. In October 1978, the political classes thought Callaghan was going to win. Things began to go wrong with the industrial troubles of that winter and with the Labour government's paralysis over Scottish devolution.

Likewise, Edward Heath was written off as a "loser"– the word in politicospeak had only recently been imported from the United States – for his entire initial period in opposition. When he actually won the 1970 election, the only politician not to be surprised was Heath himself and, possibly, William Whitelaw.

Mr Cameron is the most immediately likeable leader of a Conservative opposition since, I suppose, Stanley Baldwin. What has happened is that the terms of political trade have changed. Politicians are now expected to be nice. Mr William Hague, Mr Iain Duncan Smith, Mr Michael Howard: all failed the niceness test. Sir John Major passed. His trouble was that he was, or was thought to be, "too weak". As we know, he took himself off to The Oval cricket ground as soon as he was free of the burdens of office. Wilson was thought to be nice, to begin with anyway: he was always a card, a cheeky chappie. Lord Home, quite unfairly, was not thought to be nice at all. The public estimation of Mr Blair closely resembled that of Wilson. Alas, between Mr Cameron and Mr Gordon Brown, there is no contest: the referee would have to step in and stop the fight. To be fair to Mr Brown, he has never had any aspiration to be top of the class at the charm school. Why should he? He had already been at the Treasury for longer than any other chancellor of the last century. He has now run out of luck.

The most troubling aspect of the Crewe by-election for Mr Brown is that people have begun to vote Conservative again. I noted already that Mrs Thatcher in opposition was not so successful as Mr Cameron is being today. And yet, in 1975-79, six seats were gained from Labour: Woolwich West, Walsall North, Workington, Stetchford, Ashfield and Ilford North. Only two of these seats were retained by the Conservatives at the subsequent election. But Mrs Thatcher still had a comfortable majority of 43 (which was fewer than some people now think they remember). The majority view among the commentators seems to be that, for Mr Cameron to feel secure, a thousand Conservative policies must now bloom.

I am not so sure about that. The most active period of Conservative policy-making in opposition occurred under Heath in the 1960s. The most memorable event was our entry into what was then called the Common Market. There was also trouble in Northern Ireland, an industrial relations court that failed to work and countless strikes, not to mention the trebling (or, in some versions, the quadrupling) of the price of oil. Heath's original policies were either dropped or put into reverse by, for example, adopting a prices and incomes policy.

By contrast, in 1994-97, Mr Blair, Mr Peter Mandelson and Mr Alastair Campbell said as little about "policy" as they could decently get away with, confining themselves rather to general abuse of the Conservative Party and to vague moral uplift. They favoured disjunctions – the many and the few, the poor and the rich – which derived from the speechwriters of J F Kennedy. In any case, "policy" has at least two different meanings for different kinds of people. On the one hand, there are speeches, articles, pamphlets, even sometimes whole books devoted to such subjects as health insurance, how it is to be financed or which misfortunes are to be dealt with.

On the other hand, there are brief statements of large and general notions. It used to be a common criticism of the Liberals that they had "no policies". In fact, they had policies coming out of their ears, though you had to buy up the entire contents of the Liberal bookshop to find out what they were at any given moment. But what the critics meant was that they had no very clear idea in their own minds about what the party in question "stood for". This is a more intractable difficulty for Mr Brown than it is for Mr Cameron or Mr Nick Clegg – though I would not want Mr Clegg to stand for our continuing presence in Afghanistan for the next 30 years, as he indicated he did in the House last Wednesday.

Nor is Mr Cameron's position at all glorious. Amid the financial wastes of the City of London and adjoining areas, Mr Cameron and Mr George Osborne have been content to sit on their hands and wait for the fire engine to arrive, as it might or might not do. Mr Clegg – or, rather, it was Dr Vince Cable – did at least try to do something. The Liberal Democrats urged Mr Brown and Mr Alistair Darling to nationalise Northern Rock. There was little gratitude shown to the Liberal Democrats in the recent by-election.

But then, only governments can take action. Why should Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne frame policy only to see Mr Brown and Mr Darling steal it from under their noses? The Conservative revival, according to some accounts, started with the Tory conference (I date it slightly earlier in 2007). The hero of the week was Mr Osborne, who raised the starting point of inheritance tax. Mr Darling then brought in his own scheme, to add the deceased spouse's allowance to that of the survivor. The abolition of the 10p tax band had been carried out by Mr Brown in 2007. No one noticed at the time. As the minister of the Church of Scotland (not Mr Brown's father) is said to have remarked at the time: "Well, ye ken noo."

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