As the conference season closes, neither Labour nor the Tories are much further ahead than they were a fortnight ago. The big battalions were amassed for the final push; the big guns were wheeled out. But after hard pounding from both sides, little ground has shifted hands and the political battle remains one of attrition. We have a long, cold winter in the political trenches ahead of us.

Cameron must be bitterly disappointed. The opinion polls show that the party he leads is not heading for government. The limitations of the strategy that he, Osborne, Steve Hilton and the other Cameroon insiders cooked up in 2005 were laid bare this week. It was a bold strategy, based on a hard-headed analysis of why the voters considered the Tories ‘nasty’. Once they had identified why people had rejected them, they engaged on a sustained process to eradicate the negatives, like removing the stains from an old carpet. One of the key documents was Michael Ashcroft’s Smell the Coffee, based on private polling of attitudes towards the Tories during the 2005 election campaign. I would like to quote extensively from this report, but I lent my copy to Liam Byrne, and he never gave it back. But basically it explained the reasons why, when the Tories asked in 2005 ‘are you thinking what we’re thinking’, the answer from the voters in the marginal seats was ‘no’.

Since Cameron’s election as their leader, the Tories gave him carte blanche to be bold. He started by showing he was ‘green’ with a fake windmill, the expensive flight to see the melting icecaps, and the bike ride with the chauffeur driving the car behind him. Then the Tories claimed to be ‘compassionate’, and even ‘the party of the NHS’. They scrubbed away at their image as service-cutters, with promises to keep Sure Start and ring-fence the NHS budget. They applied bleach to their image as an old, white, party with the vague whiff of racism about it, and made some eye-catching appointments, selections and elevations of black and Asian candidates and frontbenchers. This week they rebranded as ‘Modern Conservatives’, a straightforward steal from the ‘new’ Labour playbook.

So why, after four years of rigorous application of Cameron’s patent Cleaning Fluid (washes away the ‘nasty’ stains) has he so plainly failed to seal the deal with the voters? The answer lies in Cameron’s speech to the conference yesterday. I like a good speech (I have them on my i-pod), and yesterday Cameron gave a good speech.

Let’s assess it against four criteria – theatricality, technical craft, delivery, and content.

On the first, it scored highly. The use of the Bono video, the darkness becoming light, the walk-on appearance for the shadow cabinet, and the William Hague warm-up: it all worked well. Even the Monkees at the end got them bopping in the aisles.

On the second, you have to say it was technically proficient. It began and ended on a strong image – the steep climb ahead, but the view will be worth it. It used various tools from the rhetorical devices toolkit: repetition, imagery, anecdotes, at times poetry. The mention of the death of his son Ivan, with echoes of Auden’s ‘Funeral Blues’ was genuinely moving. It was a well-crafted speech, which withstands critical analysis.

What about delivery? Cameron won his leadership election because he could speak well in public. Then the following year he wowed the crowds by being able to walk and chew gum – make a speech and roam the stage at the same time. This year he stayed behind the podium, and looked down the barrel of the cameras when he attacked Labour. Yes, Cameron can make a decent fist of delivering a speech, and knows how to work the cameras.

So that leaves the fourth of our criteria: content. Consider the content, and you understand why Cameron’s strategy has run into the sand. The enemy was clearly identified: Big Government. The leader of the ‘Modern Conservatives’ has at his core a very old bugbear: the size of the state. He didn’t mention it once; he mentioned it a dozen times. It was the central theme of the speech. If Thatcher was watching in the Home for Retired World Leaders, she would have just loved it. If they get Sky News in Hades, Keith Joseph and Ronald Reagan would have been cheering Cameron on. Cameron made an old-fashioned plea for laissez-faire, and you can’t get less modern than that.

Cameron’s speech proved that underneath the razzmatazz and showmanship, the Tories are the same old Tories. Indeed two of the same old Tories – Hague and Iain Duncan Smith – were name-checked as future ministers. That’s like Tony Blair telling the 1996 Labour party conference that his first cabinet would include Michael Foot and Bryan Gould.

By failing to reconstruct his party beneath the surface, by failing to challenge their instinctive desire to cut public spending, Cameron has made a colossal blunder. The polls prove it. People can see that the problem with voting Cameron at the next election is that the Conservatives get in.

Come the spring, the Conservatives will have exhausted their ammunition and used up their reserves. Inside their HQ, the staff officers will be questioning the soundness of the strategy. If the polls don’t shift, the frontline troops will mutiny. The war of attrition will rapidly become a war of movement once again, and with the days getting longer and the green shoots, both literal and metaphorical, appearing, Labour can make a decisive breakthrough.

Read/leave comments