It's your golden moment Dave - you must seize it

"Their time has come," one party guest whispered to me at a Tory gathering this week. The sense of inevitability of a change of government is galloping. If Mr Brown loses the 42 days terror
detention vote tonight, his credibility will
falter further because whatever view one takes of the arguments, it is a vote that a strong government should be able to win. Even if he succeeds, his relief is temporary and peripheral to his fortunes.

An electorate which has fallen so bitterly out of love with a leader is not going to warm to him on the grounds that he has extended the amount of time terror suspects can be locked up.

So we prepare for an eventual landing on Planet Cameron with very little in the way of a map. One popular view has held that telling us much more about what he intends would make David Cameron a hostage to fortune. If Mr Brown is leading Labour
into the doldrums, the Conservatives can afford to say as little as possible and just enjoy the spectacle.

Really, the reverse is true. This is Dave's golden moment. He can seize it and set his party on course as the natural government-in-waiting, or risk squandering it in a fug of ambiguities.
The "shallow salesman" jibe annoys him because it hasn't an inkling of truth about it. Anyone who feels obliged to read their prodigious output of policy reviews and related speeches can attest that the New Tories are far from shallow.

What they have been guilty of is the kind of nudge and wink politics that suggests they can have things both ways, so that even those floating voters who say they would vote for them are pushed to say what they expect in return.

Take — on our London doorstep — the Heathrow expansion. Pretty much everyone has by now come to a public view on it except for the Conservative Party, which was in favour of airport expansion (as per the John Redwood paper on enhancing business competitiveness) — and is now making critical noises, without actually giving us the benefit of clarity and opposing the third runway.

It leaves its transport spokesman Theresa Villiers nothing to say (except, perhaps, "Who is Theresa Villiers?").

Ditto nuclear energy, where the Government has enraged many of its natural supporters and upended an old manifesto commitment. At least it has made a decision. Mr Cameron's line is that it is a "last resort" and other means are preferable. Alas, an oil price spiral and geo-political pressures on oil supplies mean that the last resort looks pretty imminent, so at some point a potential government needs to produce
its settled view.

Shadow chancellor George Osborne, meanwhile, threatens colleagues who make uncosted spending commitments with dire retribution. Yet even he is not above hinting to various interest groups that theirs is the area in which a Conservative government will take a particularly benign interest. It sounds too good to be true, because it is.

The message that the party's appeal would be deepened if we knew more about its intentions has finally got home to central office strategists. Steve Hilton concedes that what it does need is a
sense of "bankability": a reliability of instinct which reassures voters that they know what they are getting if they prepare to vote Conservative at the next election. "We have a lot of work to do to show what we stand for, apart from not
being Labour," admits one key member of Project Dave.

So Cameronians want to adapt the Thatcher legacy in the idea of a social crusade, to mirror her economic and industrial one in the run-up to 1979.
A new trinity of schools, welfare and the family is thus being established as the heart of what the New Toryism is about.

This week, Mr Cameron left no one in any doubt that the family is his preferred weapon of choice. Monday's speech to the counselling charity Relate was accompanied by an interview about the importance of his own family life in
the Mail and a fetching photograph of the Camerons en famille.

The formal response from the Brown bunker is that Gordon would not dream of using his brood's Sunday ramble as an illustration of his policy credentials.

Quietly, though, ministers are enviously aware that when it comes to his conscious appeal to parents bringing up children, their opponent is racing ahead.

Of course, the PM does gives speeches which cover some similar ground but they come across as a mixture of a Fabian pamphlet and a laundry list. "I never feel he is talking about people I
know," said one of his despairing colleagues.
Precisely.

By contrast, Mr Cameron gave a genuinely thoughtful account of how governments could better support vulnerable families, including a revived role for health visitors (note that the
New Tories are seeking to embody the benign face of the state, leaving Labour stuck with its Asbos and a creeping reputation for harshness it is finding difficult to offset).

So the old Right-wing orthodoxy that the "nanny state" is a bad thing is being quashed from the centre-Right. If it can offer the kind of help to poorer families that the middle classes have long taken for granted, bring it on.

Not all Conservatives will be happy with this when it dawns on them. Mr Cameron has pledged to end the tax trap which makes marriage less attractive to some than cohabitation. At the same
time, my impression is that there has been a retreat from the idea of large tax breaks for married people. "It's not all about money," was the brisk admonishment to one interviewer who wanted to know what it all meant in hard cash.
Politicians only say that when they haven't got any to spend.

Something is moving nonetheless. Dave the Vague is starting to tell us where his focus would lie in power. "I am large/I contain multitudes," says Walt Whitman.

Mr Cameron has needed some priorities to go with his multitudes. More of those, please.