Nicholas Jones says David Cameron and his communications director Andy Coulson (just named PR professional of 2008) need no lessons on how to woo the Murdoch press: Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell blazed that self same trail in the 1990s.

David Cameron is in a bind. The Thatcherite economic model he and his party have been pushing for years has been exposed as inadequate, but his base is unlikely to accept a significant change in approach. Unless he can find a solution to this problem, Ross McKibbin argues, he risks either losing the next election or leading a government even more unsuccessful than the present one.

David Cameron’s apple-pie promises and feel-good rhetoric might sweep him to power in 2010, but there’s a yawning gap between the vagueness of his words and the likely consequences of his policies. Alex Nunns takes us on a trip into the future to see how Britain might look after four years of Tory rule.

Peter Taylor-Gooby considers changing public attitudes to poverty over the last few decades, which are increasingly sympathetic to David Cameron’s view that ‘social problems are often the consequences of the choices people make’.

Marcus Morgan argues that Boris Johnson’s ‘zero tolerance’ approach to crime is symptomatic of growing police powers across the UK and harks back to the detested “Sus” laws of the 1980s, when police were able to stop and search based on suspicion alone.