In last month’s Progress magazine, I spoke to David Skelton and other Tory thinkers and advisers about their plans to change Conservatism and make the Tory party more appealing to northern, working-class and ethnic minority voters.

Then, although the ideas and the people were ready to go, the group didn’t have a name, or a launch date. Now they’re up and running. Christened ‘Renewal’, the group has published a book of essays called Access All Areas and has officially been launched at a reception featuring Eric Pickles, and, reporting for the Guardian, John Harris. (Rather confusingly, there are only so many political names, so Renewal has to share its name with a separate group called Conservative Renewal).

So how are they doing?

A Progress member might feel a strange sense of deja-vu when reading David Skelton’s article launching his new group. Not from the content, but from the online reaction.

Comment number one? ‘How about becoming a CONSERVATIVE party – or is that too radical?’ Other helpful suggestions included enthusing the core vote with real conservative policies, a return to the death penalty, and a suggestion that the group was symbolic of elite politicians who don’t understand real concerns, and a leadership pursuing a war against the middle classes by supporting gay marriage.

For me, at least, this was rather uncomfortably like looking in a mirror of Labour’s strategic debate. I half expected someone to crop up and argue that David Cameron has lost the Tories five million votes since 2010.

Of course, comment threads can be a little unrepresentative, but the tone of Tory debate reflects a central Conservative problem.  Tory activists and supporters are believed to be rightwing and ultra-sensitive to any perceived shift away from true Toryism. This might not actually be the case, as Tim Bale and Paul Webb argue, but the perception matters to ambitious Tories.

What’s more, coalition has made this situation worse. Cameron can’t claim to have won a mandate to build a new reformed Conservative party, so any step towards the political centre appears to be a concession to the dark yellow forces of liberalism, rather than a principled change. Meanwhile, a substantial portion of the electorate think the Tories don’t care about them, or their needs and concerns.

What can the Conservatives do about this? The crucial strength of the centrist Tory outlook doesn’t stem from their policy agenda, which is mostly what you’d expect – be the party of housebuilding, stand against vested interests and rip-offs,  cut taxes on the low paid – but from the fact that they know they have a problem.

This element of political self-awareness is what rescues Renewal from Tory-lite tedium. Of the MPs, Matthew Hancock sounds surprising when he talks about strengthening the minimum wage, rather than undercutting it. Laura Sandys is strong when talking about improving consumer rights. Damian Hinds sounds compassionate when talking about the role of parenting in social mobility. Rachel Maclean displays a passion for change in her community when talking about life in the tower blocks of Birmingham Northfield.

However, the actual policy proposals that underpin all this aren’t particularly exciting. Hancock on the minimum wage aside, there’s clearly a lot more to do to create a Conservative agenda that actually might resonate, rather than one that might theoretically do so. Too often you sense Tory thinkers stepping nervously towards real centrism, then retreating to the much safer ground of ‘explaining why our policies would be better for working people’. Shaun Bailey falls for this trap, proposing tagging for paedophiles, while Hinds chooses to sidestep the issue of grammar schools, rather than tackling the argument of the party base head-on.

It’s this underpinning nervousness that may be the undoing of Renewal and other Tory modernisers. Caught up in the need to prove themselves authentically Tory (the bright blue of the branding is a clue here), they may miss the chance to convince others that they are nothing of the sort.

Am I frightened of the Conservatism represented by Renewal? No – they’re too cautious, too careful, too fearful of causing offence (Pickles at the launch? Oh dear), while their political leaders are trapped in a coalition that paradoxically doesn’t allow them the freedom to be liberal conservatives. That makes them beatable if we’re smart.

That said, they’re a hell of lot more worrying than the rest of the Tory party.

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