Agenda

A new party leader gets a long honeymoon period depending on the length of time his or her predecessor lasted in office. Thatcher got a long one because the public had wearied of Grocer Heath. Major similarly benefited from succeeding TBW ("That Bloody Woman") and though Blair technically followed John Smith, his smooth style in his early leadership contrasted with Kinnock's windbaggery.

David Cameron is aching for a good long honeymoon period. As the fourth Conservative party leader to face Blair since 1997, he should by rights be given little time to make his mark, such has been the public's low tolerance of the Tories and its leadership merry-go-round.

But a honeymoon period he is now enjoying and his team is making the most of it by promoting his youthfulness and freshness. He is the Tory who, despite the "toff" label, listens to pop music, understands global environmental challenges and seeks to ditch outdated Conservative beliefs. The new leader and his team go about promoting policy reviews and talking up new Conservatism.

All of this is an attempt to buy time. They want the public to get used to this fresh-faced leader before the tricky task of shaping party policy. This strategy is built on the assumption that the public is tiring of New Labour and will not buy shares in Gordon Brown. If Cameron's honeymoon lasts long enough, his team reasons, he can establish a vote-winning connection with "the people", even in the absence of hard policies. He would rule the party unchallenged and the policies would sail through at the end.

A short honeymoon, however, will force Cameron into having to develop new and substantial policies first, get his party to agree to them and then convince the public of their merit - a far harder task.

That is because Cameron would far rather engage with the British public than his own party. For all the hullabaloo over his election, the party shows little sign of embracing his new-fangled political style in the shires. It is here where the Tory heartlands lie, where the party's power resides, at least in terms of parliamentary seats.

It is here where the party has more than willingly confronted Labour over its housebuilding programme in good old-fashioned knockabout local politics, holding up regional planning policies and demanding a blank cheque for infrastructure investment.

Cameron could signal to developers that they should not assume a Conservative government will repeal this tax

Now it is setting its face against Brown's planning gain supplement, a tax designed to raise money locally for infrastructure and in turn generate more housing. Opposition to the planning gain supplement, which Brown proposed in his December pre-Budget report, is based on the gut Conservative instinct of the shires, far removed from the new Conservatism of the Notting Hill cadre.

Those plain instincts inspire Caroline Spelman, retained by Cameron as spokesperson on local and devolved government, to attack the tax. Yet within a week, Cameron appoints former environment secretary John Gummer to head a review into issues such as housing, planning and transport.

Here is Cameron's problem: he wants to convince the public that his election as leader marks a turning-point in his party, when the credentials of each and every Conservative shibboleth is given a thorough re-examination. But the party rank and file, those in the home counties, central and southern England, have little time or inclination for such self-assessment.

They squirm as Cameron declares his desire to dispense with Punch and Judy politics. They recoil in horror at Cameron offering Blair consensus on education reforms. Such consensus may work in some policy areas but not on housing and planning, and certainly not when the developer, the Tories' natural ally, is confronted by a land tax.

The planning gain supplement is far from perfect. Developers are convinced the tax will be set too high. It is also probably not as effective as land value taxation, and it needs to be seen in a broader context of housing need, planning restrictions and local government. On its own it will be an easy target. Yet as an answer to the complaint of many Conservative-led councils about the paucity of infrastructure investment it has merit.

In a speech to the Confederation of British Industry in November, Cameron listed inadequate public infrastructure as one of the five great dangers to Britain's future prosperity. Consensus of a sort, then, between Cameron, the wider Conservative party and the government on what needs to be done.

How to get there? As a start, Cameron could signal to developers they should not assume, as many have done before, that they can sit on their land and expect a Conservative government to repeal such a tax. The omens, though, are poor if the party's knee-jerk opposition continues unchecked. Punch and Judy will be settling themselves in for the 2006 political season and the Cameron honeymoon period will be over almost as soon as it had begun.