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David Cameron and Nick Clegg have reached their first big milestone in power. How are they doing? And, perhaps more crucially, how will they look after 100 weeks?

Barring yet another comeback, Peter Mandelson's last act of political stage management was a decision to accelerate events on Tuesday 11 May, 2010, so that Gordon Brown would not leave Downing Street in the dark â€" slouching away like a guilty man â€" but in the bright light of day. The victim of this piece of theatrics was David Cameron, who made his debut outside No 10 in the twilight. That deprived him of any dream he might have nurtured of launching his premiership in the manner of his role model, Tony Blair. Cameron could not declare a "new dawn".

That seemed cruelly appropriate for a man who had not stormed so much as limped across the finishing line into No 10. Denied a majority by a wary electorate, he was obliged to stage two photo-ops before that famous black door. After the night-time shots with wife, Samantha, he stood the next morning with his new partner Nick Clegg. Indeed in those first evening hours Cameron's fate lay in the hands of Liberal Democrat MPs and peers: without their votes he could not become prime minister.

That was 100 days ago today. Just three months later, the picture already looks very different. It will doubtless change in another three months and change some more in another three years. But as the Con-Lib or Lib-Con or Con-Dem coalition â€" one thing this government has not yet achieved is a settled name for itself â€" passes the milestone made significant by Franklin Roosevelt, each one of those early assumptions has been confounded.

The most striking change is the fading of novelty. This is not to be confused with the end of the coalition's honeymoon, which â€" if lukewarm approval ratings are any guide â€" has also come astonishingly fast. It is instead the speed with which a political arrangement once confined to the dreams of nerdish games of fantasy politics, has become entirely unremarkable. There was some gasping at the "firsts": Lib Dems strolling up Downing Street for their first cabinet meeting since 1945; Vince Cable clambering into a ministerial car; Lib Dems sitting alongside Tories on the government benches; Clegg deputising at prime minister's questions. But after each first time, the second lost its frisson. Now the sight of Chris Huhne at the dispatch box is no more unexpected than the sight of, say, Jeremy Hunt: they're just the government. Coalition politics is the new normal.

The passing of novelty has helped feed a sense of stability and assumed longevity. There's a downside to that, one felt particularly by Lib Dems: "We've gone from the new politics to business as usual very fast," says one close-up observer. But the upside is that few now express the coalition's life expectancy in months or short years, as some once did. The working assumption is that the government will serve out its term in full, right up to its own deadline of 7 May 2015 (the adoption of fixed-term parliaments was one of the coalition's earliest innovations). Indeed, the summer speculation was of a longer lifespan, with Conservatives and Lib Dems entering some kind of electoral pact. Michael Portillo suggested they fight the next election as "the Coalition". Conservative MP Mark Field has urged Tories to "hold their fire" in seats where Lib Dems risk defeat by Labour: that could mean putting up a nominal Tory candidacy or no candidacy at all. While such talk has been swiftly dismissed by the Lib Dems' left-leaning deputy, Simon Hughes, more excitable Conservatives foresee an outright merger â€" if not a takeover â€" of the Lib Dems.

Labour leadership candidate David Miliband, meanwhile, warns the Lib Dems they are about to get gobbled up: "If you go to tea with an alligator, don't be surprised if you get eaten." But even if these musings on the five- or 10-year horizon come to nothing, they are confirmation that the more fevered initial expectations â€" of a coalition coming apart at the seams before Christmas â€" have melted away.

Instead, these have been 100 days of relative amity and harmony, especially when compared with the government that went before. While Brown and Blair fast became notorious for hurling crockery, the blue-yellow alliance is a story told, at least by those involved, in the language of Mills & Boon. It started at the top and at the beginning, with that sun-drenched joint press conference by Clegg and Cameron in the Downing Street garden. Instantly the sketchwriters hailed it as a civil partnership, with gay innuendo the framing metaphor of the last three months. Lord Ashcroft was said, via David Davis, to refer to the administration as the "brokeback coalition".

The rapport between the two men at the top is indeed agreed to be extremely good. But others are working closely alongside each other too: when David Laws quit as chief secretary to the Treasury not much more than a fortnight into the government's life, George Osborne paid a farewell tribute that suggested the two had rapidly become the closest of comrades.

Both sides say they like the new arrangement. The advantages are obvious: the Lib Dems get to look like a serious party of government, rather than of the permanent, sandal-clad fringe, while the Tories gain a legion of Lib Dem human lightning rods, constantly at their side taking heat that would otherwise be convulsing the Conservatives alone.

There is, say those in the loop, another merit to multiparty government: they just don't know each other that well. Normally colleagues in a political party have worked together for years, carrying decades of baggage, filled with rivalries, snubs and betrayals. The loathing has usually had a long time to ferment. Today's government ministries, by contrast, are populated by men and women who, in many cases, barely knew each other before 11 May. Rick Nye, former head of the Conservative Research Department and now director of the Populus polling organisation, says: "It's like inviting your fiancee's brother to your stag weekend: it's inherently civilising. You're not going to have the strippers, you're not going to get blind drunk." To Nye, the Lib Dems are the fiancee's brother, forcing the Tories to be polite and behave themselves.

Some predicted that the only way the government would achieve domestic tranquillity was by not doing very much. Those expectations have also been confounded. Indeed, the scale of this administration's ambition has been its biggest surprise. Not content with a plan to wrestle the deficit to the ground and then transform it into a surplus within five years â€" a goal that would count as challenge enough to most governments â€" the Cleggerons have launched one grand scheme after another. Michael Gove says he aims to transform education in England; Andrew Lansley has embarked on the largest reorganisation of the health service since the NHS's founding in 1948; Iain Duncan Smith wants a full upheaval of the entire system of welfare and benefits. Every one of those grand projects taken on their own would be enough to keep a government busy. But to do all these at once â€" along with big shake-ups in policing and criminal justice â€" is either a mark of supreme confidence or outright recklessness. Or, perhaps, the latter fed by the former.

This radicalism does not aim entirely in the same direction. One reason why Labour has struggled to craft a simple message of opposition, besides the party's introspective absorption in a leadership contest, is that the government it confronts is Janus-faced. Liberal enough to scrap ID cards, call for the abolition of custodial sentences for lesser crimes and to establish an inquiry into intelligence agency complicity with torture â€" yet Thatcherite enough to open the door yet further to the private sector in health and education as well as scything through public services with planned cuts of 25% to 40%, more brutal than anything dared by the lady herself.

It is the ideological temper of the government's ambition that is the surprise within a surprise. There was, for example, no mention of Lansley's NHS reorganisation â€" which will put GPs in charge of an £80bn budget, with private companies likely to be taking on much of that workload â€" in the Conservative election manifesto nor even in the coalition agreement, the seven-page document that serves as the holy, foundational text of this government. Voters knew that the Conservatives wanted to cut spending earlier and deeper than Labour, in order to get a head start on taming the deficit â€" but Osborne gave little clue that he aimed to eradicate the deficit entirely by 2015, an objective beyond the dreams of even the most hard-core deficit hawks. Instead of a Conservative-led administration governing in a shade of light-blue, reined in by the social democratic instincts of their Lib Dem partners, the coalition is emerging as full-bloodedly neo-liberal on economics and beyond, with a dash of permissive liberalism in the realm of civil liberties.

How to explain this break from a script that foresaw caution if not moderation? The first answer is pure politics. "You might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb," says one coalitionista: even if you were less bold, you'd still be attacked and become unpopular with those destined to lose out under the cuts. So why be timid?

The second explanation lies in the preparatory work undertaken by the Conservatives prior to the election. They studied a variety of examples, from Sweden to the 1990s shredding of the deficit in Canada to the first term of Tony Blair. The one large lesson they learned is that it's better to "front-load the pain". Get all the cuts out of the way now, so that they have become a distant memory replaced by success and prosperity, come election day. At least that's the theory.

Lastly, the Lib Dems have refused to play the role assigned to them, that of moderating influence on economic or spending policy. The official narrative on this is that previously pinko Lib Dems took one look at the Treasury books, realised the depth of the black hole and became instant converts to deficit hawkery. The more credible explanation is that many Lib Dems had been on an intellectual journey over the last five or more years to which insufficient attention (including by the media) had been paid. The likes of Clegg and Laws and even the sainted Cable share more common ground with the Tories on fiscal policy than had previously been understood. Put simply, that this coalition is able to advance at full steam ahead is partly because the Liberal Democrats are perfectly happy to be on board.

If the stability, ambition and ideological colour of this government have all come as something of a surprise, one aspect of these last 100 days was both predictable and predicted. David Cameron has made a great personal start in the job of prime minister.

One doesn't have to like his programme to admire his performance. Sure, he has benefited from the contrast with his immediate predecessor: it's easier to look at ease in a job after Gordon Brown made such an obvious show of his discomfort doing it. The bar was set low. But Cameron has cleared it twice over.

The moment when that became undeniable was his parliamentary statement on the publication of the Saville report into Bloody Sunday. The register was pitch perfect: statesmanlike but also plain speaking and emotionally intelligent. Where Blair would have sounded actorly, even melodramatic, Cameron came across as sincere. His performances in parliament have been relaxed and assured; he is, for now, fully in control of his party.

Those who regularly see him in action say this goes beyond mere appearances. "Cameron is a good prime minister because he loves being prime minister," says one colleague. "The world finally makes sense to him: doors open, cars move when he gets in them." Apparently Cameron enjoys those duties Brown would have regarded as irritating obligations of the job: hosting garden parties, meeting the Queen, chairing cabinet meetings. "It's not that power suits him, it's that the office suits him."

On the answer to those questions will hang the fate of this government. No one can know whether the marriage of Cameron and Clegg will end with a realignment of the centre-right of British politics, shutting out Labour for a generation â€" or in an economic calamity that disqualifies the Tories and Lib Dems from power for just as long. All we can know now is that the coalition has surprised those who thought it would be a novelty characterised by weakness, division and timidity. It has started strong and bold. And it will surely surprise us again.