Cameron’s recent conference speech, pre-announced on the Conservative website, came out rather differently on the day: ‘We will always support the NHS with the funding it needs.’ A telling dilution, reflecting the pressure he was under from the hard Tebbit right for tax cuts.

Some of us had worked in the NHS in the 1980’s and 1990’s and were the union reps who had to deal with the carnage of Tory governments that said the NHS was getting the funding it ‘needed’ – despite annual winter crises, waiting lists measured in years, crumbling hospitals and rock bottom staff morale and staff shortages.

There is a huge gap between giving the NHS what it needs to barely survive, as a second class service, and what it deserves to be an effective, innovative and genuinely universal service.

Our challenge is how we respond to a resurgent Tory party pitching its tents on the centre ground, dominated intellectually and electorally by Labour for 12 years. Yes, we dominated that ground because our values and our programme chimed with the aspirations of the British people, but we also dominated the ground because we helped ensure the opposition were in well-earned obscurity.

Thankfully, commentators across the spectrum have recognised the lack of substance and naked opportunism in the Tories’ NHS cuts campaign. It may seem laughable that Cameron says the NHS is their top priority, when there is so much evidence to the contrary, but dismissing them allows him to plant the seed in the public consciousness, not merely that ‘Labour have failed with the NHS’, but that the health service is too big and too public to ever succeed.

The Tories’ 2005 manifesto, authored by Cameron, explicitly sought to undermine the NHS by offering passports for the well-off to opt out – it didn’t wash with the electorate. The new strategy is not a shift to a new intellectually coherent centre right, challenging the progressive left on its own ground, it is pursuing the right-wing 2005 strategy again, cynically using the language of the centre to try and beat the Labour government with. They know what damage their planned spending cuts for the NHS and all public services would cause. If they took advantage of the decrease in public faith such cuts would produce, they could freely recycle the opt-outs and tax cuts for those able to afford private provision – and relegate the NHS permanently to a second-class service for the poor.

We need to keep on winning the argument. It is not enough to be right, we have to use the intellectual and evidential weight we have behind us to first demolish the Tories’ cover story that they have changed, and then to expose their real agenda.

The NHS must be innovative and ever-changing. Along with over 85,000 more nurses and over 32,000 more doctors since 1997, and with 156 new hospitals built or on the way, it is new technology, the public health agenda and new ways of working that are cutting deaths in cancer and cardiac wards, cutting the amount of time patients must spend in hospital and helping people to manage their own treatments at home. Such huge changes in treatment do entail some tough decisions and difficult changes in staffing. But whereas the Tories come up with figures such as Bolton Hospitals Trust as having suffered 130 job losses and Mid Cheshire Hospitals Trust 250, the real figures are 2 and 3 respectively.

The Tory campaign claims it is standing up for NHS staff, but by such deliberate misrepresentation of staffing numbers they are just beginning a deeper campaign to erode public trust, not only in the government, but in the NHS itself.

These are the first drips through the ceiling, it is easy not to take them seriously now, but the PR man turned Tory leader knows that these drips can do all the damage they need to – long before the ceiling falls in. We need to take them seriously now before the public even start to – we must roll back the new frontiers of the Conservative party before they become credible.