Very discreetly, Cameron is writing his first Queen’s Speech

At 9 p.m. on the night before Tony Blair became Prime Minister, he was lying alone on his bed staring at the ceiling. He didn’t want to join his family, watching television, but was eventually dragged down for the News at Ten. ‘No,’ he said, when he heard its exit poll. ‘I accept that we’re going to win, but a landslide? It’s ridiculous.’ This anecdote, recounted in his wife’s autobiography, dramatises what those around David Cameron consider Blair’s worst mistake: a failure to prepare (in Labour’s case, for the sheer scale of victory). It is an error they are determined not to repeat.

Not that Mr Cameron expects a landslide. And he, too, has a near-superstitious aversion to the merest whiff of triumphalism. The electorate, he says, will rightly punish anyone who takes them for granted. But the Tory leader has been persuaded that a greater arrogance is to seek power and not to prepare for it.