Tim Bale is a leading intellectual in the study of the Conservative Party in the UK and a senior lecturer in politics at Sussex University. His new book The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron is out this week. He speaks to Total Politics about the rebirth of the party, his predictions for the election and what Cameroonism is

In the book you trace the rebirth of the party back to before Cameron, to before 2005. Just as Kinnock started New Labour, do you think Michael Howard will be remembered as starting the Cameroonian project?

There is an extent to which that is true. After the loss of the 2005 general election and, probably slightly before Michael Howard had come to the conclusion that he had tested the right electoral stance to destruction, there was going to have to be some kind of step change. He is in some ways partly responsible for that step change because he promoted some of the people who we now associate with the Cameroonian position, not least David Cameron and George Osborne. And, of course, he did the party a massive favour by staying on after the 2005 election and allowing this extended leadership contest. One of the problems the Conservative Party had is that they rushed straight from an election defeat into a leadership contest. It never gave them a chance to have a proper post-mortem on the reasons why they lost. One of the good things about that extended leadership contest in 2005 was it gave the party a chance to really go into why it thought it lost.

Last year I went to see a fantastic debate between Tim Montgomerie of ConservativeHome and Philip Blond of ResPublica about Cameroonism. Montgomerie was saying he is a traditional and Blond was arguing he was a radical. Do you accept the criticism that Cameron is all things to all men?

I think Tim Montgomerie has a point in the sense that he sometimes talks about this ‘And Theory’ of Conservatism. This suggests that it is not necessarily contradictory to hold quit hard-line positions on some issues and quite liberal, progressive attitudes on other issues. The one he would obviously talk about is that it’s not necessarily inconsistent to argue for controlled immigration at the same time as saying you are interested in international development. I think Cameron, to some extent, does actually buy into that ‘And Theory’. In some ways, he is quite a traditional conservative but in others Philip Blond has a point that is quite progressive.

If I was looking for people in the Conservative Party who remind me of David Cameron I would go back further. I would pick someone like Ian Macleod in the 1960s. He is a person I think gets it in many ways about how society is modernising and needs to change but on the other hand doesn’t sacrifice traditional Tory believes — for example, very targeted welfare systems.

Are you saying its less of a rupture and more of a repackaging of a traditional message?

I don’t think Cameron represents a massive rupture with the Conservative Party. I have put it in the book in this way: he has restyled the party rather than fundamentally reengineering it. That is not to say that he hasn’t made some reasonably profound changes. But I don’t think he has sacrificed what most would associate as the good things about Conservatism along the way. I think he has managed to convey the idea that the Conservative Party is a party you can trust not to spend too much of taxpayers’ money. It’s still a party you can trust if you are worried about immigration. On the other hand, he has managed to signal to the electorate that this isn’t, not that it ever was, a kind of nasty party and that it is concerned with problems that supposedly only occupy ‘the chattering classes’ as well. He is concerned with global development and the environment. Although the recession has changed things to some extent so that these kind of issues are on the back burner, he got a lot of credit in the bank talking about those things early on — and talking about things like the national health service early on — so it means he can take a tougher line on the economy and keep the idea that he is caring as well as competent.

When we think about Blair, we think about 1994 and the dropping of Clause 4 as a symbolic moment to signify that he had pushed the party in a particular direction. Do you think Cameron has had that symbolic moment or are people just burying their differences? Say, for example, on Europe?

I think David Cameron has chosen very much not to have that Clause 4 moment. I think he’s realised that he doesn’t actually need it. He hit the ground running when he started and signalled to people that he was a new kind of Conservative but didn’t do it in such a way that would really bring him into conflict with the party. He had a row with the party over grammar schools, for example, in 2007 and that wasn’t something he planned to do. And he quite quickly rowed back from that row. I think he has spent most of his time as leader trying to keep a many parts of the Conservative coalition on board. I think on Europe he is lucky in some ways that he has inherited a party that is thoroughly euro-sceptic. Europe is not an issue that will divide the party. He is quite euro-sceptic himself, so I am not sure you would ever have seen him take on his party in that respect. An issue like Europe is an issue where the Conservative Party is in line with most British electors, so it is not something he needs to move away from. Whereas if you think about Blair and Clause 4, nationalisation by that time was not at all a popular policy with the electorate.

In the polls Cameron does well but the party still does not. How much of the rebirth of the Conservative Party is a rebirth of the party rather than the fall of the Labour Party?

There is the old cliché that oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them. But David Cameron must be credited with putting his party in a position to take advantage of Labour’s woes. One of the reasons that Labour has become so unpopular isn’t just Labour itself, it’s the way that the Conservatives, and their supporters in the media, have been effective in undermining Gordon Brown and in particular undermining him personally. A series of problems are always attributed to his incompetence or his inability to run the country properly. So while Labour has shot themselves in the foot, the Conservative Party has provided some of the ammunition and we can’t forget that. Cameron and Osborne have proved themselves very adept opposition politicians.

What are your predictions for the election?

I think it will be on 6 May and I suspect the Conservatives have a pretty good chance of winning with an overall majority — not necessarily a huge one, but a working majority. The kind of majority that will allow them to govern pretty effectively for a four or five-year Parliament.