To any foreigner, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg appear as peas in the same pod of contemporary politics, especially when compared to American candidates. Brown, Tony Blair, Alistair Darling, David Miliband and Lord Mandelson could sit at the same table as the Conservative frontbench. They would swap ritual insults but find it hard to disagree on any great matter of policy.
On most recent bones of contention they agreed with each other, even when large swaths of the public did not. They agreed on the credit crunch. They agreed on the Iraq and Afghan wars. They agree on Europe and on immigration. They even agree on the need to redeem Brown's £163bn debt, with public service cuts that protect "frontline services" while "achieving efficiency savings". This greatest confidence trick of modern government is the direct consequence of another such trick, that banks are "too big to fail".
The parties even agree in practice on such tangential issues as the advance of welfare privatisation, on tightening social benefits and on pretend decentralisation of government to "communities". In their outlook on the world and in a basic liberalism, British political parties are nowadays much as they were in the 18th century, like-minded clubs who inhabit the same street and only occasionally resort to breaking each other's windows.
Curiously the nearest to a right-left differentiation at this election has been between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, with Labour to the right and Lib Dems to the left. Witness taxation, the euro, Trident, the Iraq war, student fees and immigration. Yet such is tribal loyalty that I doubt if many Labour leftwingers will vote Lib Dem on these grounds. Their attitude to Labour is like Sybil Thorndike's comment on marriage: murder often, but divorce, never.
Cameron is certainly untried, as are most new leaders after long periods in opposition. So were Blair and Brown in 1997. Cameron continues to display numerous similarities to Blair prior to office, good and bad. In the latter category is an addiction to waffle – as on the vague "big society" – and his reluctance to give direct answers to hard questions, notably on cuts and Afghanistan. He is not alone in that.