Ritual attacks on Brown, Darling, Mandelson and the rest, laboured jokes about bullying, Piers Morgan and the forces of hell, showcasing of young, gay, female and ethnic Tory candidates, policy-free speeches by shadow cabinet members you’ve never heard of, all building towards the big speech by David Cameron where he will try to emote, relate, understand, and tickle the tummies of middle England. It will be a slick, stage-managed, scripted affair, with Tory councillors and activists as little more than rent-a-crowd.

But what of the bars and restaurants of Brighton, the fringe meetings and sponsored receptions? The ungoverned spaces, away from the cameras and microphones? The mood will be one of muted panic as the prospect of a return to office after 13 years disappears down the plughole. After so long waiting, with an election fewer than 100 days away, the Conservatives’ poll lead has withered away. The daily tracker that YouGov is running suggests a poll lead of just six points. Ipsos MORI’s poll for the Telegraph this morning has the Tories on 37 per cent, down three, with Labour on 32 per cent. Not only does a five point lead not give the Conservatives a Commons majority, it doesn’t even make them the largest party. When the Tories met in Cheltenham twelve months ago for their spring conference, their lead over Labour was 18 points, and people were talking about 100-plus majorities. In the past 12 months, they’ve dropped 13 points. In the dark corners and in whispered conversations over canapés, the Tories may realise that this is not going to be their 1997. This is their 1992. No flag-waving crowds lining the route to No 10. Just defeat, recriminations and yet another leadership contest.

Politicos being politicos, they will be looking for someone to blame this weekend. In a spirit of cross-party friendship, I can offer an appropriate target for their opprobrium. It seems obvious that the author of the Tories’ misfortune is George Osborne. Osborne deserves to be blamed for two reasons. The first is that he is in charge of election strategy. The Tories’ strategy, from 2005 onwards, was decontamination. That meant masking the Tories’ instincts and instead mirroring the British people’s own instinctive support for the NHS, meritocracy, and fair play. That element of strategy worked, and gave them healthy polls leads since 2007. But by failing to fundamentally modernise the Tory party, those poll leads hit a plateau. Unlike New Labour, they never managed a sustained position in the 50s. And now, under pressure and scrutiny they are being reversed. Just short of the wire, the Tories are running out of steam, and according to John Rentoul’s account of crisis meetings in Notting Hill, clueless about what to do next.

No-one in Brighton should be particularly surprised that the wheels are coming off an election campaign run by George Osborne. He has no particular qualification or experience in running elections. He eschewed student politics (where so many learn the craft of elections) at Magdalen college, preferring the Bullingdon Club and the editorship of Isis. At 22 he was daft enough to have his photograph taken with his arm around a dominatrix called Natalie Rowe; if you want a career in politics this tends to be the kind of thing you avoid, even at an early age. At Conservative Central Office and as a special adviser, he was a backroom boy. With no experience of the media, campaigns, advertising, or electioneering, it is only his friendship with Cameron that explains his appointment as Tory election supremo. Imagine if Tony Blair had appointed the bass guitarist of Ugly Rumours as director of Labour’s campaign in 1997, because he was an old mate. That’s basically the call Cameron has made.

The second reason Osborne should be blamed for the Tories’ haemorrhaging support is his role as shadow chancellor. The jibes about his youth (he was 33 when he took on the job) and inexperience (next to none) are unfair. Gordon Brown had never been a minister before his decade as a successful chancellor of the exchequer. He even looked quite youthful in 1997. It is not Osborne’s youth that is at issue, fun though the ‘Boy George’ tag is. It is his mishandling of the shadow economic brief. He started by aping Labour’s approach to public spending. When the recession came and the money ran out, he had a titanic row with Cameron about what to do next. His Mais lecture this week suggests most of the big questions have not been settled between the two men. How else do you explain the absence of granularity and policy detail? An even bigger error is his stated ambition to be ‘tougher than Thatcher’ on public spending. That line is a gift for Labour’s strategists, wrapped in nice paper with a big blue ribbon. Just as the Labour poster putting Hague in a Thatcher wig in 2001 linked the modern Tories with their hated former deeds, so Osborne’s comments allow Labour to present the Tories as unreconstructed Thatcherites. Five years of decontamination undone with one poisonous phrase.

The Conservatives in Brighton should demand Osborne’s head on a plate. But apart from the mastodon Clarke, there is no-one who fits the bill as replacement. So Osborne will remain, dragging the Tories down and squandering their poll leads at the rate of a point per month, despite the recession and Labour’s own goals. Osborne is Cameron’s weakest link, but he lacks the guts to say goodbye.