A guide for the perplexed Conservative

These are good times for David Cameron. With the Conservative Party's poll ratings hitting the stratosphere, phenomenal local election results, Boris Johnson's victory over Ken Livingstone as London Mayor and the stunning result in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election, things could hardly be going better for the Tories. Yet Simon Heffer is unimpressed:

Since the Conservative Party still stands for very little, and has slogans where it might more profitably have policies, it would be pushing things rather for it to believe it was enjoying its current popularity on account of anything it had done. Look instead at a Labour Party led by a terminally wounded, uncharismatic introvert with a selection box of personality defects and you start to see the answer...

Yet so flushed is the Leader of the Opposition with his own success, and so intense is his belief that the argument about his own rightness and genius has now been settled, that he is starting to engage in the odd, unfortunate act of hubris. Such was an article under his name in a leftist newspaper last Friday that carried the headline: "We are the champions of progressive ideals."...

Sir Herbert Butterfield's 1931 text The Whig Interpretation of History seems to have been written with Mr Cameron in mind. It derides the Whiggish view that all history is about progress, that the humane and democratic institutions of the modern era were the product of a long-defined Whig strategy to improve the world, and that those who had not participated in this enterprise (that is, the Tories) were the villains of the piece.

Mr Cameron's whole life is a tale of Whiggery, and this article a monument to it. He and Charles James Fox would have seen eye to eye on most things, and may yet prove equally effective in securing their aims.

Let us consider, too, what Mr Cameron has left out. He attacks Gordon Brown for scrapping the 10p tax band - although Alistair Darling's recent statement has answered that question - because of the effect this would have on the fight against "poverty".

But there is no mention of the most progressive thing a government can possibly do, and which ought to be at the heart of Tory principles: no mention of the across-the-board tax cut, for poor and rich alike, that signals a determination to allow individuals to spend their money, rather than to have the state decide how to do it for them.

There is nothing "progressive" in following Labour's spending plans for the first four years of a putative Tory government: it merely keeps people in their chains, prevents the revival of the productive sectors of the economy and causes the spread of a suffocating bureaucracy.

If Mr Cameron really wants to get "progressive", then let him talk of ending the present Soviet-style fetish of redistribution.

Where to start? The first thing to understand is that when David Cameron talks about "progressive values" he is not talking about "change" at all. He is talking about maintaining the status quo - or at least the status quo ante the arrival of the dismal Brown regime. The Cameron objective first and foremost has been about "decontaminating" the Conservative brand - i.e. making the party electable again - and his strategy in achieving this has been to imitate Blairite New Labour as closely as possible. This has necessarily involved adopting some Blairite language and more-or-less deliberately alienating his own party's right wing.

While much of this can be viewed as cynical, and certainly a lot of it was not pretty to watch, it has to be admitted that the Tories' current success amounts to a vindication of the Cameron strategy, at least in its own terms. It is admittedly true that Cameron has been the fortunate beneficiary of the woeful incompetence of Gordon Brown and his government. It is possible that in the same circumstances William Hague, Michael Howard or even Iain Duncan-Smith might also be enjoying substantial leads in the polls - possible, but not probable - and who could possibly know? It is, however, extremely unlikely that the Conservative Party would be doing any better if it were blessed by the sagacious and saturnine leadership of a Simon Heffer. If Cameron has been lucky, he is the first Conservative politician to have been lucky in fifteen years - and there is such a thing as making your own luck.

So if Phase 1 of the Cameron revolution has been successful, what next? Assuming that the Conservatives win the next general election - which looks increasingly probable - we are unlikely to see a radically reforming Conservative government. For one thing, radical reform is not really what the Conservative Party is good at. During periods of Conservative government, when large numbers of people suddenly decide to vote Labour it is usually a sign that the voters want change. During periods of Labour government, a shift of support to the Conservative Party usually means the voters want to be rescued from whatever hole the government has dug them into. Cameron's mandate from the people will be, first and foremost, to be less incompetent than the other lot, and to steer the ship of state through what are, at the moment, murky economic waters. Accordingly, the Conservatives have been cautious about public service reform, cautious about public spending, and cautious about tax cuts. In other words, the Conservative government, when it comes, will be conservative with a small 'c' as well as a big 'C'.

Heffer's derisive dubbing of Cameron as a "Whig" is therefore spectacularly misplaced. David Cameron is Tory to the core. On the other hand, many of the policies Simon Heffer is demanding are not conservative, but liberal: tax cuts are an issue for the poor, not the rich - and must be at the centre of any progressive agenda; rolling back the frontiers of the state is a fundamentally liberal cause - people should be free to spend their own money; they should be enabled to work for themselves and their families rather than exist as welfare junkies enslaved by a pusher government; they should enjoy first class public services delivered by providers who know the importance of service rather than third class public services run as bloated and inefficient state monopolies run by bureaucrats. These are not traditional Conservative policies - but they are characteristic of the only Whig Conservative governments in history: Margaret Thatcher was a liberal, who fought to drive through a liberalising programme in the teeth of opposition from the conservative establishment within her own party. And in the end she was overthrown - by Tories.

That said, there is such a thing as a Conservative opposition to Cameron: these are the anti-EU fundamentalists, the immigration-obsessives and the social reactionaries whom Cameron has worked hardest to annoy. Many of these people have already decamped to UKIP or other points on the far right. They have little to offer except sound and fury (the reader comments appended to Heffer's article are a disturbing eye-opener), which is no doubt why Cameron has calculated that he can afford to drive such people away. Although right-wing headbangers may rally around commentators like Heffer and Peter Hitchens, their siren calls to a purified, Talibanised conservatism are ultimately negative and destructive.

The lesson to learn from all this is surely that a positive programme for the future cannot dwell on the defeats of the past or the indignities of the present. It is time for a genuinely new departure in British politics.