The centre has moved Right, not Prime Minister David Cameron So it's game on, right? The next general election campaign has begun. The blizzard of U-turns in which proposed tax rises were vaporised, and that evangelical speech on the need for even more welfare cuts - all of the noisy shifting of rhetorical furniture which comes under the BBC's heading of "Lurch-to-the-Right" - means that David Cameron is "re-positioning himself" or "redefining" his party's message (or something else that sounds carefully planned) in order to set the Conservatives on the road to outright victory. No more messing. The Tories are sharpening their act (or reverting to type, depending on your political tastes) and making a serious effort to galvanise their core vote. David Cameron is coming home! If this were true, the obvious question would be: if Mr Cameron and his friends now know that this is the way to win elections, why didn't they adopt it the last time? When exactly did they discover that talking turkey on immigration and attacking the entitlement culture were more likely to appeal to voters, and not just Tory ones, than being soft on crime and soft on the causes of crime? If it is positively useful (as I'm sure Downing Street knows that it is) to have Left-wing newspapers shrieking about the return of "the nasty party" in the run up to 2015, why was it "toxic" in 2010? Why has there been such a dramatic strategy change and who is responsible for it? There would seem to be two possible explanations. The more hopeful, from a Conservative point of view, is that Mr Cameron has had an epiphany which compels him to embrace his genuine convictions: he is a natural advocate of free-market, low-tax economics and of the private virtues, and is now prepared to commit himself openly to these because he has learnt the value of conviction politics. I personally have not met anybody who believes this. Alternatively, there is the more generally accepted account which is that the Cameron-Osborne project is now so punch-drunk with exhaustion and tactical disaster that it is simply falling back on the old religion. This is the view of the BBC, the Left-liberal commentariat and a proportion of the Right-of-centre press which has no more confidence in Mr Cameron's revised set of stated principles than it had in the earlier version. But both of these theories - the optimistic one and the cynical one - are based on a false premise. That is, that something in the basic philosophy of the Tory leadership has really changed. In fact, the most fundamental axiom of Cameron Conservatism is that there must be no fixed strategy except for the one unalterable rule of remaining on The Centre Ground. If the Downing Street clique has changed its position on, say, immigration or welfare, it is because it wants to remain where it perceives the majority of public opinion to be at this moment. They are not, as the Guardian comment pages would have it, giving up the centre ground in order to move to the Right. They are moving to the Right because that is where the centre ground now is. They are still standing by what they have always believed, which is that they must follow public opinion rather than lead it. Of course, this makes them look as if they have changed their minds - and are being wildly inconsistent - on really major issues: as if they are in the business of re-defining the party's basic objectives in order to distance themselves from the Liberal Democrats in the lead-up to the election, etc, etc. But that is the effect rather than the instigating cause of their tactical shift. What they have discovered about the Gospel of the Centre Ground is what many of us tried to tell them - oh, so long ago, when they used to thrust their opinion poll data triumphantly under our noses. The CG is not a fixed point at the precise mathematical centre of every public policy argument. It moves all the time. In the 1970s it was on the Left - so far to the Left, indeed, as to constitute a kind of soft Marxism. In the 1980s, it was on the Right - infuriated by trade union militancy and enthusiastic about share ownership. In the 1990s, it was Left-ish: private prosperity and the belief that life would always get better bred a "willing to pay more tax" generation which complacently embraced bourgeois guilt. That was the era in which Mr Cameron properly entered the scene. It was to that incarnation of the CG that he believed (or was told) that he must appeal. So he re-invented a Tory image that was acceptable to the salon liberals who, as it happened, were the inheritors of the paternalistic tradition with which he felt comfortable, and he seemed to assume that this was a permanent solution to his party's future. Now we are in the post-2008 recession. The electorate is hard-up, economically insecure and tough-minded. The CG has moved to the Right again: perhaps further to the Right than it was in the 1980s, when extreme Labour Leftists could still comfortably win control of local councils, as they certainly could not now. So the Conservatives are not leading - for some unsavoury or misguided reason - a quixotic charge to the Right of mainstream opinion. They are actually struggling to keep up with the people's change of political mood and priorities. The idea that they are being forced to resurrect old pieties by a Right-wing press (we should be so omnipotent) or a few influential websites is absurd. Newspapers and blogging sites must respond to the demands and views of their readers even more attentively than political parties, if they are to survive. Elections come up every four or five years: circulations and viewing figures are a day-to-day test of the quality of a media outlet's relationship with its consumers. Paranoid fantasies about the power of a handful of media conspirators who supposedly manipulate the opinions of millions of people this way or that - with no connection to the real experience of their lives - are an insult to the populace. Voters, especially politically committed ones, are not passive lumps waiting to be told what to think by self-serving editors or vainglorious proprietors. Media outlets survive and gain authority to the extent that they are in tune with a significant tranche of ordinary people's views. If Mr Cameron and his party seem to be changing (or reverting) to a more robust, hard-edged social and political stand, that is not because they have been coerced or bullied into it. It is because they have gathered that that is what the people want. It remains an open question whether the people - who heard them espouse very different views such a short time ago - will be convinced that this time they really mean it.