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And he keeps making the point that some voters at the next election will have been born after Thatcher was deposed.

“To an extent, the point about people being born after Mrs Thatcher went is just to try and bring home to the Conservative party and to commentators and everybody is that that era is over. Great things happened, but we’ve just got to forget about that and recognise it literally means nothing. And the second thing is, the Conservative party has just done incredibly badly among young people. Some people say young people don’t vote very much, so it doesn’t really matter. Well, actually, if you can’t win over young people, then you’re never really going to win over the rest of the country.”

Contemporary politics is all about stepping over corpses, corpses of the past, your past, friends, foes, the media, failed policies, failed parties. Cameron had already stepped over some big ones: Thatcher, the party. But some big swollen stiffs still littered his path. First there was Blair, not dead yet but plainly unwell. Cameron decided first to kill him by identifying with him as a younger man. “I want to talk about the future,” he said in the House. “He was the future once.”

Meaning: I am what you were, young and fresh, but look at you now. Blair was suddenly Mick Jagger in Randy Newman’s song – “I’m dead but I don’t know it”. That corpse can now be stepped over. How? By being nice to it and only taking Brown seriously as worthy of abuse.

“With Blair at question time,” he says on the train, “there’s a sort of jokiness between us… With Brown, he gives his opponent no quarter at all. It is literally: you are evil, you are dead, I will kill you, I will stamp you into the ground until my boot is banging up and down on your face. There is no way you can get into a reasonable conversation with him.”

Blair’s dead and Brown’s horrible. Brilliant.

Another corpse: Europe. Cameron is asked about Tory divisions and he starts talking instead about the excitement and energy of Asia. Europe stiffed. Brilliant again, and I tell him so.

“We have this problem that people have seen a scepticism about a European constitution as somehow backward-looking, which it isn’t. People of my generation are travelling to Bangkok as much as they are to Paris. They don’t share this post-war obsession that Britain must be part of a tightly knit European bloc as an inherent part of our future. They think it is one network we are involved in. The rest of the world is another network. They are much more open and relaxed about it… I don’t think anyone will look at me and the team I’ve got and say these are hopeless, stuck-in-the-past Little Englanders, because we’re not.”

Okay, so this is one classy corpse-stepper, a Victorian cavalryman picking his way through the battlefield, elegantly failing to get blood on his boots. But who is this guy? Where’s the beef? Nobody knew. All the post-victory profiles were the same, desperate attempts to catch up, to hang shorthand attributes on the man. He listened to the Smiths and, of course, he went to Eton.

“I was just labelled as the Old Etonian David Cameron, as if that was my full name.”

And there was the family and the wife’s family. Toffs, the lot of them. Sir Alec Douglas-Home was the last proper toff to run the Tories and surely we don’t like toffs any more. Ah, but deep down we do, and anyway, toffs have changed. Eton doesn’t turn out traditional toffs any more: it turns out fully secularised modernisers who manage to avoid giving the impression that anything not involving wet dogs is a bore.

Cameron is New Eton, New Toff. He rides a bike, a toff thing to do but something that signals that he is not Old Toff and also reinforces the message that he can actually do it. Brown on a bike? No. Cameron seems to carry very little class baggage and yet he has that airy confidence, the sense that he always knows which fork to use. I’ve watched him at several meetings and there are no visible nerves, only the conviction that he is the right man doing the right thing in the right place. People spot this at once and defer.

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