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Here's a tale of two speeches: David Cameron set out this week to clinch his claim as the saviour of the "broken society", Gordon Brown tackled the impact of the global food crisis on our wasteful eating habits.
By common consent, Mr Cameron came off the better, setting his face against "moral neutrality", which turned out to be a polite way of saying that the fat and poor also had to take some responsibility for their condition.
Over in Japan at the G8 , Gordon Brown was issuing his own clarion call to cut our food waste. Alas, he chose to deliver it at an event which marches on its stomach - through a six-course lunch and eight-course dinner.
At least some part of the PM's misfortunes are about the way he is communicating. Someone, somewhere in the No 10 organogram should have thought that the aftermath of a banquet was not the best setting to tell us all to eat more leftovers - assuming he could not work that out for himself.
Behind the poll figures and by-election dramas, the mid-term test for the party leaders is who is getting a hearing for what they want to say.
On that score, Mr Cameron has the edge because he is grasping a mood of social concern and responding to it, while Labour appears tone deaf about a major preoccupation
What links the despair over yet another fatal knifing in London and all the other tragic tales of street violence is the sense that none of the best intentions or initiatives have stemmed the spread of random, appalling and dangerous behaviour.
With this in mind, there has been some deft repositioning behind the front of a seamless development in Tory thinking. "We've done modernity and compassion: now we can do Conservatism," says one aide of the Glasgow speech in which Dave ventured that we should be less squeamish about saying "what is good, bad, right, wrong".
The less evasive around him privately say the other unsayable: that the "hug a hoodie" episode caused the Tories a severe setback among lower-middleclass and working-class voters, who doubted whether they inhabited the same world of risk and fear many people experience on a daily basis.
Another reason Mr Cameron can increasingly venture forth saying he is culturally Conservative and proud of it is that Labour no longer presents a confident face in dealing with pressing social issues and there is a huge gap in the political market.
Mr Brown has never been keen on dwelling on crime, and often argued with Tony Blair that the more Labour did so, the worse it was for the Government.
Alas, an obvious gap looms in the Brownite approach. It is fixated more strongly than ever on the economy and gives far less attention and emphasis to the other main cause of anxiety: the uncomfortable feeling of deepening social malaise.
Changing behaviour before it spirals into drastic consequences, like the rise in knife and gun crime, is what all politicians would like to do. Both parties called on cue this week for tough prison sentences for knife-carriers. They know that merely filling the prisons with yet more teenagers is not a lasting answer.
That is where the book of the season comes in. Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness is co-authored by Richard Thaler, one of those immutably self-confident American behavioural economists who specialise in one-word titles peddling a neat new approach to old problems.
Professor Thaler tells me he has been on a visitation to Camp Cameron, where he has acquired guru status. His " Nudging" is the belief that we can be influenced - often subconsciously or covertly - to do one thing, rather than another in our own best interests. So it encourages us to put more earnings towards our pensions by making us "opt out" of saving schemes rather than opt into them. It promises to prod children to eat more healthily by putting nutritious food at eye level in school canteens.
Philosophically, it's a bit of a mishmash - calling itself "libertarian paternalism", though really it is a lot more paternal than libertarian.
Practically, if we move beyond the soft-sell examples it demands that we have an agreed idea as to what they are nudging about. There is an odd chapter about how to nudge more people to get married by weakening the definition of wedlock so far that it is a long way from what Mr Cameron would envisage in his crusade to restore the institution as the building block of family life.
Nudge is seductive to the New Conservatives because it caters to the need to appear liberal while tackling the failures and shortcomings of Left-liberal solutions. It also highlights some internal schisms within the parties. The Tories are aligning themselves on one hand with the need to increase freedoms. David Davis is on an everwidening crusade against the incursions into various liberties in the Haltemprice by election this week.
Being subtly or subconsciously coerced is not, however, the same as being free. Indeed it does not answer the substantial Cameronian point this week that unless people feel more responsible for their situation and choices, they cannot ultimately redress them.
So the Conservatives need to work out where they want all this to settle and how firm their "nudges" will be. If you want to edge youths away from a knife culture, you may wish to be tougher on broadcast rules for music that celebrates the knife and casual violence. But that is clearly interventionist on a scale that even Labour's bossy Harriet Harman tendency has balked at.
New Labour should also have a strong interest in these Thaleresque arguments about how big challenges can be addressed without merely imposing the kind of top-down, spy-in-the bin solutions which irk and alienate.
Indeed, many in the "Beyond Gordon" redoubts of the party, such as the thinktank Progress, are just as keen on debating Nudge-ism into the early hours as their Cameronian cousins.
In the battle of perception, though, Mr Cameron is winning because he sounds as if he has been preoccupied by behavioural concerns and tussling with them. The Government behaves as if it is glossing over such unpleasantnesses, or treating them as subsidiary.
That is a mistake. One of the most powerful factors in ejecting a government is the feeling that everything is in a mess, from the economy to the way we live. Unless Labour takes the social argument more seriously, it will forfeit something that has been one of its main strengths, no matter how great the contradictions in Dave's recipe for redemption. Someone (brave) needs to call Gordon and nudge him about it.
