The fact that will do for the Tories is that they don’t know what they think. The twists and turns of trying to take the toxic from a political brand has left them dizzy. They don’t know where they are or what direction they are facing. At the moment they are getting away with confusion and emptiness.

But they won’t keep on getting away with it, if they are made to decide.
I remember Tony Blair being asked what John Major could have done between 1994 and 1997 to make it harder to create New Labour. He said ‘He should have made us decide – each week, in Parliament’. The Tories had the advantage of government and they should have used it to test the foundations of New Labour.

The lesson to draw from the vote on 42 days is identical. When Gordon Brown made the Conservatives choose between policy and positioning, they fell apart. David Cameron wanted to defeat the government. Michael Gove and George Osborne were worried they were on the wrong side of the argument. David Davis just wanted to have an argument.

What’s interesting about this is that it is not an accident. It happened because they are in an ideological tailspin. And when asked to pick a direction, they pulled in three different ones. The centre could not hold.

They couldn’t stay in the centre, because it was positioning that united them there, not belief.
We are right to point out that the conservative party has become little more than a PR agency. But the problem isn’t the adverts. It’s the product that’s deficient.

There is one aspect of the Tory sales pitch I agree with. Cameron has said many times that we shouldn’t judge him on where he’s come from but where he’s going. Absolutely: I couldn’t care less where he went to school or who his parents are. It’s where he’s going that worries me, not where he’s been.

Because I don’t think, in his heart of hearts, he knows who he is any more. At every stage in his life David Cameron has just drifted with the orthodoxy around him. The answer, for him, is always blowing in the wind.

So when people say he’s really right wing they’re almost right. He was really right wing once. He wrote the 2005 manifesto, after all. But then the wind changed direction so he turned with it. He loved free markets and Thatcher when all his friends did. He no doubt believed the same as Norman Lamont, when he worked for him.

He bears, as was said of Lord Derby, the imprint of the person who sat on him last. And we were the last people to sit on him. His team worked out that New Labour was popular. This was attractive to Cameron: looks like a new orthodoxy. Better join up.

This is the real charge against the Tory leader: that he has no settled convictions. He just has bits and pieces along the way. And you can’t lead if you are confused.

When he wrote that 2005 Manifesto, he forgot to mention the environment. When he became leader, his focus groups told him the environment was a bridge issue back to the centre ground. He wanted to become new. So off he went to the Arctic Circle.

Vote Blue, Go Green, we were told.

Then the oil price went up, the focus groups turned and all of a sudden he’s less keen. So now we find him, at Prime Minister’s questions, attacking the very green taxes that he himself had proposed a few months earlier.

His politics are like the parting in his hair. One week it’s on the right, then it shifts to the left, then all of a sudden it’s down the middle.

Being poorly defined is a deliberate strategy for the Tories, of course. It’s partly tactical – if you commit to nothing you don’t disappoint anyone. If you’re not defined, you’re harder to attack. It’s like trying to nail water to a wall.

Of course people attacked Tony Blair and New Labour in similar terms in the run up to 1997. So: why is my accusation today different from those once levelled against us?

Because their emptiness is grounded in the conservative intellectual tradition.
The philosopher Ted Honderich concludes his book on Conservatism by saying that, in the final analysis, it is a tradition that has nothing to say for itself. A political ideology which claims not to be an ideology and which has no faith in politics. There’s not much to be done, and if there were, the state shouldn’t do it.

That’s why, historically, the Tory always turns up late to the party. Think of Peel in Tamworth in 1834 belatedly conceding that they might have to put up with the Great Reform Act. Peel’s successors today have grudgingly accepted the minimum wage, tax credits, Bank of England independence. They have adopted the usual conservative position – committed to defending a world they would not have made.

What a strange rallying cry: stop the world. I want to get on. I can’t stress enough what an inadequate response to the modern world this is. In an era in which whole industries rise and fall within a generation, in which capital traverses the globe in an instant and labour crosses borders to meet the urgent request from employers for high skills, what is the value of conservatism?

The modern world is not moving at the slow pace that conservatives like. The nation-state can no longer act alone. The institutions on which conservatism has based its claim to power have all required modernisation.

Yes, markets need to work, public services need to change, society needs to adapt. An overweening state can be a barrier. But laissez faire is just as bad.

Over the last ten years, we have used the power of the state to modernise Britain. We strengthened competition policy so markets would work better. We retrained all our teachers so they could teach numeracy and literacy better. We created civil partnerships because everyone deserves equal consideration. We brought in tuition fees so universities could compete. Today’s question is not ‘how do you hang on to the status quo?’ It is: ‘how do you lead change?’ This is a world for radicals, not conservatives. This is a world that requires leadership, not positioning.

Look at their health policy, if policy isn’t too exalted a word. It consists, essentially, of the demands of the various interests cut and pasted into a policy paper. Stop the reform, end the change, head down and carry on as we are. Never mind that the improvements started when we had the courage to make changes. Just ignore the fact that people’s expectations are rising all the time.

This isn’t a policy – it’s a punt. It’s taking a chance on things working out, with no plan B if they don’t. Or consider their foreign policy. Give up on fostering democracy around the world. Retreat from the European Union. Put up the shutters and hope the world goes away.

And in policy areas where they are forced to act, they get it hopelessly wrong. On welfare reform, they have to do something because they are making an enormous claim. They are saying that Britain is a broken society.

When they say that what do they mean? Who do they mean? Are they talking about you? Is your world broken?

They don’t want to upset you, so they pick on imaginary groups usually named after television programmes: Shameless parenting, the Jeremy Kyle generation. It’s no accident that the groups they target are minorities who are easy to stigmatise – young men, ex-offenders and migrants.

They have to invent their targets, because this is not a broken country. This is a country in which more people are in work than ever before. It is a country in which we have the best ever examination results. In which the NHS treats more people more quickly than ever before. It is a country in which crime has fallen by 35 per cent.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that individuals don’t have problems or that nobody ever does anything wrong.

But my point is that these are specific problems, happening to real people. They need policies specifically designed to get to their roots. And you can’t do that if you declare in every speech, as the Tories do, that society is broken and it’s the state that’s the problem.

Here’s the real intellectual mess. Having diagnosed the country as broken, whatever that means, the Tories declare themselves powerless to fix it. The solution is to ‘roll forward the frontiers of society’ which seems to be a new way of saying roll back the frontiers of the state.

The Tories have always had a problem with that word – society. First they claim it doesn’t exist. Now they say it does exist but it’s broken. And then they say that we should vote them in as the government even though government is powerless to fix society. Instead society should simply fix itself.

I think I preferred them when they didn’t even know there was such a thing. Cameron is fond of saying that there is such a thing as society, it’s just not the same as the state. Thanks for that, Dave. Next week he’ll point out that there is such a thing as the sea, it’s just not the same as the sky.

John Stuart Mill once called the Tories the stupid party. Then they became the nasty party. Now they are the nice-but-dim party.

The correct position on the use of the state is an agnostic one. If it helps solve a problem, it’s a good thing. If it doesn’t, it’s not. And there is no doubt that, in welfare, if you eschew use of the state for ideological reasons, you’ll find yourself in big trouble.

Without state action there would be less money spent on tax credits. That means there would be more children in poverty. There would be less money spent on pensioners, in the name of reducing means testing. So that would mean more pensioners in poverty.

It’s no wonder they won’t sign up to our target to end child poverty. It would already be 1.7 million worse if we’d just continued their policies. It would be even worse if we adopted their policies now.

The point is that we are developing the right partnership between individuals and the state, not throwing all the responsibility onto one because we are committed to reducing the other.

That’s why we want a welfare state in which we restore the earnings link for pensions, but ask you to save and work longer in return; one in which we increase tax credits, but require people to work; one in which we give better support to those who are ill, but require them to take up that help.

In Ending Child Poverty, the document we published alongside the Budget, we made clear our commitment to abolishing child poverty. That’s all children, not just those whose parents are in work.

We have drawn inspiration from countries like Denmark and the Netherlands which have very high employment rates. They don’t achieve this by removing the safety net. They have a very clear deal: a more generous welfare state requires something in return. We will support you back in to work, but require you to look for and take work. More support, in return for more responsibility.

This is where an active state can really make a positive difference. I can say that with conviction and enthusiasm. Our opponents can’t manage either. This is our politics in action – smart collective action fostering individual independence.

So that’s why we are offering more support to help people improve their skills, to help them deal with health problems, to tackle whatever it is that is preventing them living as independently as they want to. But it’s also why we will require them to take up that help – because conditionality in the welfare state is the ally of social justice.

This is an especially acute problem for people with a drug addiction. We are considering proposals in the Welfare Reform Green Paper to help people get their lives back on track, not simply to get their next fix. But the bargain here is that we will provide additional support in return for taking up the offer.

The point of the conditions they attach in Denmark, in the Netherlands and increasingly in this country, is that they point people back towards independence. They are not sticks to beat people with, until they learn to fend for themselves. They are a way of ensuring people don’t get trapped on benefit which nobody wants.

The Tories, by contrast, take their inspiration from welfare systems in which the main incentive to work is the fear of poverty. My opposite number typifies their approach.

Chris Grayling’s speech last week is a good example of their problem. He announced as though it were new a lot of things we are doing already. Look, everyone, I have invented a wheel. We’ll have employment boot camps, he briefed – these turned out to consist of CV writing and job search. Well, we are doing that already.

He said we should stop the clock when people leave benefits, so they don’t play the system by working for a week and signing on again. Well, we are doing that already.

He said we should help people should to learn English if it’s a barrier to work. Well, we are doing that already too.

Imitation is supposed to be flattery. It doesn’t sound like it when Chris Grayling does it. But pretty much everything sensible he had to say was borrowed from us. He had reinvented the New Deal just as we are reforming it.

Then he inadvertently, and without seeming to realise it, wasted millions of pounds of taxpayers money. He proposed to require everyone apart from long term disabled and parents of young kids to do full time activity. But he includes people who already get back to work under their own steam. He claims he would borrow this money from the private sector – but they would never be able to raise it because the investment would not pay for itself.

So, instead of saving the £3 billion they say they need to save from the welfare bill, the Tories are actually committed to increasing it by millions of pounds. And that leaves them without any policies on child poverty, and no way of claiming welfare can fill the hole in their spending plans.

So they can’t even stick to their own beliefs. It’s comprehensible when they say they don’t think the state is any good at ending poverty. But they really confuse themselves when they start spending money to try to achieve it.

Imaginary spending pledges aside, the paucity of the thinking was shocking. The sheer smallness of it all was amazing especially, remember, when he is declaring that welfare is the bill we pick up because society is broken. The nearest he ever comes to suggesting how to fix it is to say: “the voluntary sector will do it”.

I’m a great fan of the voluntary sector. It does some great work and two weeks ago I launched a taskforce led by the voluntary sector to advise on how best they can contribute to welfare reform. But without state action and investment the voluntary sector will do a lot less.

Abdicating responsibility for the vulnerable and needy and telling yourself that someone else will take care of them is a strange way to ‘fix society’.

Look at what the Tories are actually doing. Perhaps the only silver lining of having Tories so prominent in local government is that they will provide us with plenty of examples of what they are actually like once they get their hands on power.

Look at what happens when they cut the funding. Enfield council, Tory led and cutting third sector provision. The same is true in Hammersmith and Fulham, Tory led where they are cutting voluntary capacity across the borough.

So they say in Opposition they believe in the voluntary sector, but in power they cut it. They say in Opposition, they believe in public services. But the mess they are in on public spending shows this is again positioning and not policy.

Lansley has committed them to our levels of spending on health. Fox has said there will be no defence cuts. Osborne committed them last summer to our education spending. Yet they say the proceeds of growth will be shared. So some tax cuts then. Yet, if there is no change to the big spending departments, which departments are going to take the brunt? The money has to come from somewhere.

There is no thought here, no sense of purpose or mission. Just a slogan and just the confidence of entitlement married to somebody else’s political programme.

Anyone thinking of getting hitched to David Cameron should be aware of what they’ll get: something old, not much new, something borrowed, something blue.

I’m not suggesting the Tory party is exactly the same beast it was. We will only criticise it effectively when we appreciate the ways in which it has changed, as much as the ways it hasn’t.

Indeed, it is to the credit of the Labour party that it has been forced onto our ground. But I still think that there is a clear and important choice.

We offer leadership; they would bring confusion. We understand the partnership of private, state and voluntary sectors that a modern welfare state requires. They are so obsessed with the size of the state that they will never work it out. We offer pragmatic radicalism; they offer ideological conservatism.

It’s perhaps harder to see the choice than it was. But I think of politics like a long journey and political parties like the carriages of a train. They are running on parallel lines. They leave the station together, pass through the same stations, speed through the same countryside.

For quite a distance it appears that they are travelling together, en route to the same place. But slowly it emerges that one of the lines arcs gently to the left; the other gently to the right. The trajectory is, at first, hard to discern and, for quite some time, the view from the right side of one train looks the same as it does from the left side of the other.

But then, look again.

Time has elapsed and suddenly distance has opened up such that even the people who are facing each other can barely see the other train. They continue in this way until, much later, the two carriages arrive in the different stations to which they were destined all along.

As they disembark there is no sign of the people in the other train who, it transpires, had not wanted to come on this journey, to this place and, for that reason, had boarded a different train, bound for somewhere else.