Very difficult to judge really whether he is stupid and lucky, with some good advisers put in by the Party, or whether he is wily and malevolent.
If he was a character in a novel (one by Jilly Cooper probably) who would ever believe that, in real life, he could get away with:
* 2010 election - "Vote Blue - get green", promising to be the "greenest government ever" and then doing nothing, but nothing to justify it. In fact the reverse e.g. cutting the amount of money the energy companies have to pay in "green taxes" i.e. subsidies for insulating the homes of poorer people .
* The whole Coulson - Brooks thing (straight out of a Cooper novel that one, horses included)
* Convincing people in 2005 that the NHS was safe in his hands, because his family had really needed the NHS when his brain-damaged son was alive. (Not the kind of thing that private medicine is ever going to cover). And that he was not going to do any reorganisations. Then doing a reorganisation that nobody wanted. Then he drags his dead son into his election speeches all over again in 2015 all the while planning massive £22 billion cuts (more actually - that's just England).