Can Dave's niceness beat Gordon's spin?

Dave's speech was pretty good. But IDS really was a revelation. A Tory called for social justice in a way you could once have heard at a Labour conference.

Bracketing the Quiet Man in the Blackpool programme, there was David Davis, promising to scrap ID cards and oppose Labour's attack on fundamental liberties; and Ken Clarke, with some interesting, if limited, proposals to renew British democracy. On Monday, it was George Osborne, planning to make the super-rich pay at least some tax. And then yesterday, Cameron himself, re-emphasising his commitment to a centrist, green agenda and talking about giving power back to local councils.

At Labour, the week before, such talk was in rather shorter supply. After 10 years, the big idea there seemed to be hand-held computers for the police. And from the Prime Minister, we heard crass, Right-wing rhetoric about "British jobs for British workers" and deporting foreign criminals (two completely cynical promises: we can't even deport Philip Lawrence's murderer). Bizarrely, the language used by Cameron on these subjects was far more careful, far more nuanced.

So are the Tories, once famously condemned by their own chairman as the "nasty party", now officially nice? And is it Labour who are the nasty ones?

Certainly, over the past five years, Labour's claim to the hearts of progressives has dramatically weakened. Apart from the economy, where the news has been pretty good, the Government's record can be divided into three categories.

There are those areas, such as health and education, where its heart is in the right place, but where achievement has not matched up. There are areas, such as the environment and transport, where Labour simply doesn't get it. And there is a third group of subjects - foreign and security policy, issues of liberty and state power - where Labour is actively malign and dangerous.

This is probably a sign of the metropolitan, bourgeois circles I move in, but I know lots of people in London who will never vote for a government determined to issue us all with ID cards and track our movements on a giant database. (Other democracies may have the cards, but none has anything like the database. It will be the biggest invasion of privacy in Western democratic history.)

Labour still doesn't realise the level of concern and mistrust it has provoked among some people who ought to be its natural supporters. Last week, at Bournemouth, I kept being asked how I could call myself a progressive yet support Boris Johnson against a Labour mayor. My answer was that Boris is a pluralist and a supporter of liberty. Labour, and Ken, simply are not.

The Tories still need a big idea, a big reason for people to vote for them. So here is a suggestion, one towards which they were groping anyway in Blackpool this week. The political struggle is no longer between Left and Right, as the cross-dressing of the past fortnight shows. It is between authoritarianism and liberty. For all his talk of "new politics", Gordon Brown's record shows he stands for authoritarianism. The Tories need to stand for liberty.

It may be objected that the British public seem rather keen on ID cards, Asbos and "crackdowns"; that civil liberties are only an issue for Lefty columnists. But actually the authoritarian/libertarian argument can be - and, at Blackpool, was being - applied to a much broader range of voter-friendly issues.

The fact is that authoritarian, top-down control of hospitals, policing, local authorities and much else has failed. It has not raised standards enough; it has removed individual discretion to the exclusion of common sense; it has made communities feel powerless and divorced from those who run their services. Not so much broken society, more broken democracy.

The Tories this week were starting to articulate a persuasive case for trusting people, professionals and local councils to decide things for themselves. To spend their tax money on what they want, rather than what Whitehall has decided they should have. That is an argument for liberty that Mr Cameron can win. London, for instance, would certainly have Crossrail by now if we'd had more control of our city's tax revenues.

The Tories have a lot further to go to develop these policies. If there's an election next month, they're almost out of time. And there are, of course, other difficulties. Voters expect governments to come up with answers to their problems; they may not like being told that they have to work out the answers themselves; and they may secretly rather prefer a man like Mr Brown, who knows all the answers so much better than the rest of us.

And much though we may disapprove of New Labour's ruthlessness and nastiness, these qualities have won them three elections, and may be about to win them a fourth. It remains to be seen how the mostly very nice men and women of the Tory press operation will fare in the bitter crucible of an election campaign.

Dave's front bench, too, are decent people: often more thoughtful and caring than their Labour counterparts. But many of them lack hunger, as their directorships and other interests outside politics show. It is frankly bizarre that any member of the shadow cabinet should treat it as a part-time job.

Significantly, the song played at the end of Cameron's speech in the hall yesterday was Jimmy Cliff 's "You Can Get It If You Really Want". The next line is "But you must try, try, try." Somebody was sending a message. For the Tories, there could be such a thing as being too nice.