Both Gordon Brown and David Cameron are spending their holidays studying the work of former Tory leaders Photo: Reuters  Asked what books he would be reading on the “few days” he is taking as holiday, Gordon Brown said he would be watching sport, specifically tapes of the events he missed this summer. He is too sports mad to “look away now” when the results are flashed up, so it must be that he proposes to while away the hours watching reruns of the Ashes, the Open or the mixed doubles at Wimbledon. Mrs Brown must be delighted.  Of course, there is no accounting for how busy people relax. James Purnell has used the weeks since his resignation from the Cabinet to put his library into alphabetical order. William Hague taught himself the piano after the 2001 election. Formula One boss Max Mosley likes to dress up and take orders from uniformed women. The method is of no consequence – what matters is the result.  On Radio 4 recently, Jonathan Powell, who was Tony Blair’s chief of staff, interviewed his former boss about the pressures of being prime minister. They agreed that the mental wellbeing of any leader relied on a good night’s sleep and proper holidays. Mr Blair’s point was that regular kip and a few weeks by the beach provide not just physical rest from a gruelling job, but a chance to think without incessant interruptions.  Mr Brown’s “holiday” will be a short break in the Lake District, in between weeks at home in Fife where he will devour books, pound his computer’s keyboard and talk to friends. Like Margaret Thatcher, Mr Brown is not the holidaying type. Getting on with the job, in his tired phrase, is what he lives to do.  Number 10 may have announced that he will be away for the whole of August, but Mr Brown’s “few days” served notice that the telephone calls and emails will start to fly while the rest of us are still unpacking the suncream. His advisers have been known to protect their own holidays by surreptitiously deleting their numbers from his mobile.  David Cameron is from the Blair school of leisure, with recognisable holidays lasting weeks in foreign parts, free from computers or Sky TV. This summer he will be in Brittany and Greece, with stops in Oxfordshire. Where Mr Brown makes a virtue of being on perpetual watch, the Conservative leader believes plenty of rest with his family is vital to stay sane and make good decisions.  Whatever they do for the next five weeks, both men will spend much of their time thinking about the struggle ahead. The general election campaign begins in earnest at the party conferences at the end of September. Those two weeks will define the following six months. Each will be expected to make the decisive speech of his leadership, one that will address once and for all the question: “Why should I vote for you?”.  In the case of Mr Brown, even his friends doubt if he knows the answer — they have come to the view that he has never worked out why he wanted the job. Mr Cameron, in contrast, has the answer but has yet to find a compelling way of communicating it to the voters. It is this summer’s curiosity that both are studying the work of former Conservative leaders for inspiration.  Mr Brown is currently obsessed with Winston Churchill, and how to avoid his fate. Those around the Prime Minister describe how he is preoccupied by the idea of a war-time leader who guided the nation to safety through dark times, only to be thanked with a thumping defeat.  For the Second World War, read the financial crisis; for D-Day, read the bank rescues and the fiscal stimulus package. By his reckoning, Mr Brown has led us through the Normandy bocage, but the Ardennes and the Rhine lie ahead. The trick, Downing Street believes, is to fight the next election as if it was November 1944, when the war was going well but far from won. On no account must Labour give the impression that the worst is over. Put this to ministers and they laugh out loud. “Churchill lost because Labour had a vision for the future of a land fit for heroes, and he didn’t,” one says. They pray that Mr Brown will surprise them with his vision when he appears before conference at the end of September.  If he succeeds, then the party is energised for a fight to the death, bolstered by polling that persuades them that there is no public appetite for Mr Cameron, and that Mr Brown’s “Tory cuts” attacks are gaining ground. If he fails, the likelihood must be that Labour gives up and the election campaign becomes a fight for the succession between Harriet Harman, Ed Balls and David Miliband.  Mr Cameron’s summer reading list includes the speech Margaret Thatcher gave to the 1978 Conservative conference in the days after James Callaghan – himself struggling to get the country out of an economic disaster of Labour’s making – surprised everyone by bottling it and putting off an election until the following spring.  Mrs Thatcher’s speech has caught the eye of the current leader’s advisers, who reckon this conference will be the defining moment of Project Cameron. More than 30 years later, the Iron Lady’s words still echo as a searing indictment of a failed government and a clear statement of principles. Those pressing Mr Cameron for more detail should note how it says next to nothing about what Mrs Thatcher might do in power, besides “restoring the unity and good name of our nation”.  Talk of producing specifics or even a New Labour-style pledge card is dismissed by some in Team Cameron as precisely the kind of stunt that has so alienated voters. Indeed, there is evidence that the specifics of policy that he has offered are proving too much for Whitehall: officials are fiercely resisting his proposal to publish online every item of public expenditure over £25,000. It may sound boring on the doorstep, but this is a piece of culture-changing transparency that is central to the revolution he is proposing, one that prizes social responsibility over state control.  Instead, the Tories will focus in the autumn on drawing our attention to Mr Cameron’s qualities as a leader, and the decisiveness he showed at the start of the expenses scandal when he took an axe to his parliamentary party.  He, in turn, will press home the need for an urgent transformation of how politics works that recognises the rage that Norwich North will demonstrate on behalf of the nation today. Tory campaign managers have been shocked by the loathing displayed towards all parties, and fear that it will last.  The 2010 election is not quite decided; the conferences will see to that. It will be about leadership more than detail, and who can display it most convincingly. There is plenty of inspiration in Churchill and Thatcher for Mr Brown and Mr Cameron to fill their summer hours.  But if the choice they present us is between a weary warrior and a new leader with steel in the eye, then Lady Thatcher, on the verge of her 1979 triumph, must have the edge: “Our party offers the nation nothing less than national revival, the deeply needed, long-awaited and passionately longed-for recovery of our country. That recovery will depend on a decisive rejection of the Labour Party by the people and a renewed acceptance of our basic Conservative belief that the state is the servant not the master of this nation.”
Benedict Brogan says Cameron and Brown are both plotting campaigns that    draw on Tory leaders of the past