Conservative thinktank Renewal’s new pamphlet The Party of Opportunity is intended to blow away the idea that the Conservative party is only for braying public schoolboys and hard-faced men who have done well out of capitalism.

In the pamphlet 14 Tory members of parliament from working-class backgrounds share their life stories and relate what in their own histories them led them to join the Conservative party.

Gathered together, the pamphlet reads rather like a collection of parliamentary selection speeches, explaining what made the author a Conservative and what inspired them to be politically active. It would serve as an excellent primer for prospective Tory candidates seeking to impress sceptical constituency parties.

For a Labour activist the tone is both familiar and revealingly different. Collect the stories of a similar group of Labour MPs, and you would find emphasis on the value of programmes for social justice, of free hospitals, well-funded schools, the redistributive impact of a social democracy that helps not only an individual or a family, but a whole society, achieve their dreams.

For these Tory MPs, though, the emphasis is firmly on the individual and family contribution. There are lots of references to supportive families, to the value of hard slog, to making your own way, despite all difficulties.

In an impressive contribution Sajid Javid speaks for many of the contributors when he says of his parents, ‘All they had to rely on was their own drive and determination, a willingness to work hard, and the confidence to take risks in the hope of greater rewards.’

Javid’s article, which will surely form the basis of a leadership bid one day, should be required reading for those considering the future of the Conservative party.

If the role of the family is lauded, the lurking presence of the state in family lives is either an irritation or is outright suffocating. As Andrew Rosindell describes his youth, ‘It felt as if the state were controlling every aspect of our lives and we were without economic freedom.’

Andrew Bingham, thinking about his family’s small business, agrees: ‘The heavy hand of the state can stifle and suffocate and we should never lose sight of the fact – it is the revenues of the private sector that fund the public sector’.

In a recurring theme, the state even fails to help those who it is supposed to support. As Jackie Doyle-Price writes after praising her own school, ‘Too often, though, comprehensives were allowed to become mediocre, which meant that over time fewer people with my background were able to go to good universities.’

Paul Uppal also found the system worked against, not for, him. ‘I was largely ignored and, at first, put into remedial classes by my teachers who wrongly presumed that my competency with the English language was poor. It was an individual teacher, Mr Breedan, not the state, who spotted Uppal’s potential, and it is Mr Breedan’s efforts, not the abstraction of state schooling, for which Uppal profoundly and genuinely grateful.

This is a valuable point for the left to grasp. For many who experience it, the actual impact on their lives of the state can be negative, as much as positive, restrictive, as well as liberating.

When we praise the state we often praise an idealised general creation that bears little recognition to how it can be perceived, or how individuals really act within it. This can create a gap between progressive intention and stultifying reality which kinder Conservatives consider a sign of our naïveté, and which those less inclined to generosity see as sign of leftwing high-handedness or indifference.

By contrast, for these MPs it is the freedom to buck the system and shape your own life – to own your own home, to start a business, to break away from what is ‘expected’ of you and whatever has held you back, that is liberating and fulfilling, and the Conservatives, whether by selling council houses or helping small business, are the party of such fulfilment.

Yet it is not just the state which it views as an obstruction to success – and here the collection reveals the great weakness of the Conservative party.

For some of the contributors, their emphasis on individual aspiration, family support and aspiration causes them to define themselves against, not just the state, but against those who did not succeed or, more accurately, do not seem to try. This can be astonishingly personal.

Angela Watkinson writes, ‘My father was old Labour, seething with resentment at anyone who had a better life than him. He assumed that they had either achieved it dishonestly or had it handed to them on a plate. My mother, conversely, had ambition and aspiration to make life better by her own efforts and I instinctively knew she was right.’

Alec Shelbrooke has a similar attitude to old classmates: ‘Seeing people I went to school with, who never bothered doing their homework or paying any attention, fail their exams and spend years living off the state has shaped me enormously as an individual.’

In both examples the responsibility for failure, as well as success, lies primarily with the individual. This can read very harshly, very judgementally.

This is the problem which many working-class Tories face when advocating themselves as the party of aspiration. Seeing themselves as having achieved through hard work, talent and focus, some give in to a tendency to blame a lack of achievement by others not on forces that hold others back, whether social or political, but instead on the flaws in those who fail.

In this world view it is not just the state, or obnoxious Labour councils, that hold people back, but the very mentality of those who do not succeed.

This is a tendency that John Major, in his oblique way, counsels against in his introduction. He asks Tories to ‘follow their better instincts and define ourselves by what we are for not what we are against’, recognising that ‘many in our society need help’. David Skelton, too, focuses on the positive, not the negative.

Yet reading this collection of the personal stories of Tory MPs, I am not sure this advice has been heeded. For a significant strain of thought in this collection is about rejecting and getting away from, not a damaging state, but a damaging mental attitude.

Until many Tories stop thinking about the vast majority of the public like this I suspect the elements of their case with real capability to chime with voters’ experience will be lost in the miasma of clear dislike that surrounds their message of personal fulfilment. From this evidence that change still seems a long way off.

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Hopi Sen is a contributing editor to Progress. He tweets @HopiSen