Matthew Norman: Brown's first task is to reinvent himself

If one of the criticisms commonly levelled at David Cameron is that he's little more than a posher, fresher version of the chameleon Blair, this much is in no doubt. After Wednesday, it will be a while before he feels tempted to ape the Prime Minister by posing the rhetorical question, "Am I bovvered?".

Bovvered to the point of raw panic is what the Tory leader should be today, as his strategists ask themselves how they could have fallen into such a trap. Wilfully ignoring how the Chancellor has run Britain for a decade more as Atlanticist free marketeer than Soviet ideologue, they attempted to terrorise the floating vote by painting him as an barely reconstructed socialist. And then, without a shred of warning, Gordon Brown stretches a nail-bitten mitt across the dispatch box and, with enviable dexterity, finds Middle England's G-spot.

That the Budget was by and large income tax neutral, and that almost no one will be better or worse off by more than a weekly Big Mac, couldn't matter less. Gordon's one intent was to star on the front of yesterday's Sun as tax-slashing superhero, and that's precisely what he achieved. It was cheap, corny and unremittingly cynical, in both content and presentation (leaving it for the last sentence of the Budget, forsooth! Then again, lurking beneath the granite surface has always been the hint of music hall showman).

It was also a stroke of rampant political genius, instantly assuaging the fears studiously stoked up by the Tories that he'd mark his accession by doing a twirl in the corridor between Nos 10 and 11 and emerge outside the Downing Street front door as Middle Class Nemesis, pants outside his trousers, to announce a return to the 1960s Wilson administration's top tax rate of 19 shillings and sixpence in the pound.

If Mr Cameron and George Osborne are bemused as to how they came to underestimate the Chancellor to this degree, we shouldn't be too harsh on them for not working him out. For 10 years he has rigidly controlled domestic policy yet contrived to remain the riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma that was Churchill's perception of Uncle Joe's Russia, with an outer layer of paradox for good measure. He has never disguised his disdain for Mr Blair or his craving to replace him, yet for all the Stalinist ruthlessness outlined by Lord Turnbull and his other detractors, he has lacked the killer instinct to take any of several gilt-edged chances to do so.

He has deliberately maintained a split personality, shamelessly playing Iron Chancellor to the CBI and reappearing, sometimes in the same week, as Red Gordon to whip up the TUC. He has talked the talk of egalitarian wealth redistributor, and walked the walked of arch neo-Thatcherite, for example by imposing a scandalously overpriced public-private partnership funding system on the London Underground. He has sustained this duality with such delicacy that no one has properly rumbled him.

That's a very cute trick granting him surprising leeway to reinvent himself as Prime Minister, and how he goes about recreating his image will clearly do much to decide the next election. He may calculate that his best option is not to bother at all, but rather to rely on the contrast between his heavyweight stolidity and Mr Cameron's featherweight appeal, seducing an electorate sick to its eye teeth of facile charm. But if he chooses to go in for what that ghastly buzz word knows as "narrative", he has a story to tell.

This is the high-risk strategy, demanding an ability to be natural in public he has only shown thus far in the tiniest of glimpses. The grin he wore on the hospital steps when he came out carrying his new babies was dazzling and enchanting, but the far more familiar synthetic smile he cranks out for TV appearances is disastrously mechanical.

His friends talk of a private man who is witty, warm and easy going, but friends always say that (even Mrs Thatcher's had a go once), and, even if true, it's irrelevant for those of us unlikely to be invited to Dunfermline for kitchy-sups. The question is whether he has the will and ability to pull off arguably the greatest challenge a politician can face, and reshape his personality in public.

You'd be brave to rule it out, because this is an intriguing man with great powers of recovery. As a schoolboy, having lost an eye in a rugby accident, he faced the likely loss of the other with what his doctors suggested was amazing sang froid. He endured several operations on the good eye, being obliged after each to lie for weeks in a darkened room. You can barely imagine what torment that must have been for so enquiring a mind, but apparently he bore it without complaint.

More recently, he has endured personal tragedy with stoicism. He spoke of his third child's cystic fibrosis without self-pity, just as he and his wife, Sarah, handled the death of their 10-day-old daughter with humbling dignity. The opportunity for vote-winning emoting was one we might imagine other power-hungry politicians taking. Yet the most emotive comment I can find from him is the brief, oddly affecting remark that for a year after Jennifer died he couldn't listen to any music (a surprisingly common human reaction to grief).

If Gordon has been the contemptuous, domineering Treasury bully boy his erstwhile colleagues and civil servants portray, few will give a stuff about that. There isn't enough contempt on this planet for the likes of Alan Milburn and Charles Clarke, and anyone who can domineer a mandarin into doing anything demands respect. But what works for a Chancellor doesn't hold for a Prime Minister, who is obliged to play a paternalistic role, and it will be fascinating to discover whether finally sating of his ambition will relax him enough to allow the cuddly uncle of his friends's description to come down from the attic.

If so, David Cameron is in the most appalling trouble. If not, Mr Cameron is merely in deep trouble, because we must now anticipate Gordon unveiling a genuine tax-cutting Budget - via Alastair Darling, or whichever eunuch he inserts at the Treasury - this time next year, with a view to calling a general election in the summer or early autumn of 2008.

A few months ago, a friend asked my advice about how to make a novel political bet. She wanted to back William Hague to be the next Conservative prime minister, and I put her on to a chap at William Hill who offered her 33-1. At the time, given the Tory instinct to jettison failed leaders without delay and the dearth of credible alternative replacements, this struck me as very generous. After Wednesday, those odds look positively ridiculous. If Mr Cameron finds himself wide awake at 3.30am in the foreseeable future, it probably won't be only the noise from his new wind turbine that's keeping him from sleep.

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