Dave and his wife Sam meet supporters in London today (Photo: Reuters)

“Every time a friend succeeds I die a little,” said Gore Vidal.

Not a problem I’m going to be having any time soon with my old Oxford chum David Cameron, as you’ll see from my You Know It Makes Sense column in this week’s Spectator.

Here is a guy who had the chance of a lifetime: he could have gone down in history as the man who saved Britain from its greatest crisis since the second world war. He could have rescued our economy, restored our national sense of self-worth, given us back our stolen liberty, rolled back the state, regained our sovereignty, slashed taxes and red tape, stemmed the tide of immigration, clamped down on Islamist aggression and undone all the damage that has been inflicted on us by Blair and Brown.

And what’s he offering instead? Some nice photographs taken ten years ago showing just how fit his wife is. The exciting news that Sam is pregnant. A big poster of a young black woman saying she wouldn’t have voted Conservative before but now she will because Britain’s Broken. Another one showing how baby-soft and pink Dave’s cheeks are. Have I missed anything? Not a lot. Cameron’s future claim to fame will surely be as a prime minister so floppy and useless he makes Ted Heath look like Winston Churchill.

If you want more in that vein, read the piece. It’s the last anti-Cameron stuff you’re getting me before the election. (Unless of course, he does something quite egregiously stupid, in which case all promises are suspended.) Why? Because like the mighty Lord Tebbit I agree that however much we all loathe these despicable, Saul-Alinsky-loving Fabian faux-Tories, they are nonetheless our least worst option in this General Election.

Everyone in their heart knows this, which is why I make a prediction – as indeed I have been predicting for some time – that the Conservatives are going to win with a decent working majority. They don’t deserve it, they haven’t earned it. But the cynical calculation that Team Dave has made is right: serious conservatives, for the most part, have nowhere else to go. For all our blustering about how cross we are and how we’re going to punish the Tories at the polls, the fact is that when the moment of truth comes in the polling booth, our consideration above all else will be: don’t let those New Labour b******s get into power again.

There are a few exceptions to this rule – Tory MPs you shouldn’t vote for, no matter what. But let us save them for another column.

“You wait till he gets elected. Then you’ll see what a proper Conservative he is,” say all the Kool-Aid drinkers who seem to infest the comments section of any blog when you try to point out this self-evident truth.

To which I reply: by his deeds shall ye know him. Never mind all those rumours you hear about how secretly virulently anti-Europe he is and how passionate he is about the environment: the story I’m about to tell has the virtue of being true and effectively scuppers both.

Did you know that under three successive Tory leaders – Hague, Iain Duncan Smith, and Howard – it was official party policy to pull out of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP)? This is the iniquitous EU arrangement – negotiated under the auspices of the beyond-dreadful Ted Heath – whereby the fishing rights to Britain’s territorial waters (once the most fish-rich in all Europe) were divvied up among the European Community member states in return for what benefit to British interests no one has ever fathomed.

The CFP was a disaster socially and economically, for it has all but destroyed our fishing industry and deprived 22,000 fishermen of their livelihoods. But it was an even greater disaster environmentally. Every year, thanks to the EU’s ludicrous quota system, billions of fish have to be chucked back dead into the sea. Furthermore, it has led to the overfishing not just of British waters but (thanks to bribe money paid to sundry Third World basket cases) of most of the coast of West Africa (save Namibia), to the point where, like the Grand Banks, fish stocks will probably never recover.

If ever there was a EU policy worthy of negation  it was the CFP, which is why the Conservative party was committed to pulling out of it unilaterally. At least it was till Dave Cameron took over in 2005, at which point – true the spirit of his soul-mate Ted Heath – he surreptitiously shelved the project.

When I crossly pointed this out to a Cameroon Conservative the other day, his defence was that Dave was of a mind that his party had to pick carefully where to fight its battles. If he was going to confront the EU, he wanted it to be over economic and working directives, rather than over fish.

I suppose the Kool-Aid drinkers will see this as an example of good old Tory pragmatism. I see it as moral cowardice marinaded in dishonesty and slily served with a subtle pinch of hypocrisy. When something is as manifestly wrong in every way as the CFP is, surely the right thing to do is take a stand against it. It’s all very well wittering on about how Green the Conservatives now are, but – unlike some problems I could name which begin with “Anthropogenic” and end with “Global Warming” – overfishing represents a clear and present danger to our ecosystems.

I’m afraid it’s precisely this kind of spinelessness which explains why some of us find it so hard to be enthusiastic about the prospects of a Cameron administration.

What he has to say in Spectator Coffee House about the Conservatives’ new non-policy on Europe is an essential read.

He starts off quite kindly towards Cameron. Nelson understands as well as anyone that Cameron WILL be our next prime minister and that, a bit like parents and schoolteachers are supposed to do with children, you can’t forever be telling him how rubbish he’s going to be. If you’re going to criticise, first you must say something nice. So Nelson does:

He is right not to promise what he calls a “made-up referendum”, that would accomplish nothing other then vent rage.

Semi-compliment over and done with, Nelson sticks in the knife. Cameron’s promise to renegotiate powers from Brussels is a nonsense, he explains.

What the new Tory package amounts to is a promise to ask the EU very nicely if it will consider handing back a few powers over employment and justice. The answer will be ‘no’. Saying that he might hold a referendum over a wider package of guarantees will carry no weight. By ignoring the Dutch and French ‘no’ votes the EU has shown that it cares not a jot what the little people think. It is a project of the elites, for the elites.

Given that the EU is guaranteed to crush all the Conservatives’ pathetically feeble attempts to claw back tiny bits and bobs of British sovereignty, what is the answer? There is, says Nelson, only one thing that will frighten the EU bullies – a referendum on whether Britain should remain in the EU at all.

The ‘in or out’ question is seen as an extreme position in Westminster, which shows just how out of touch our political class has become. Brussels’s own polling shows that less than a third of the British public consider our membership of the EU to be ‘a good thing’ — and this was last year when our net contribution to the EU was just £3.1 billion. Next year it will be £7.8 billion (due to the budget deal the would-be President Blair negotiated) and serious questions will be asked as to whether all these regulations are worth the money we pay for them. Recent EU research shows that just 37% think the benefits of EU membership outweigh the costs.

Perhaps some Kool-Aid drinkers out there will be able to tell me what wonderful benefits Britain will get from the EU mafia in return for that £7.8 billion protection money. Perhaps they’ll also be able to explain why, no really, Cameron’s policy announcement on Europe yesterday is as tough as tough can be and will eventually result in all sorts of powers being returned to Britain. The absolute right to decide on the size of the white margins on our postage stamps, maybe. Or the right of parents to chastise their kids lightly on the hand if they have stolen a car. Or the right of employers to sack any staff member found with his hand in till on more than 22 occasions.

Certainly I’m quite sure that whatever Cameron is planning, it will be – as Dan would no doubt say – the terrors of the earth.

In the Blair era we had “The Third Way”; in the Cameron era we can apparently look forward to something called Red Toryism.

Red Toryism, my bull***t detectors tell me is pretty much what you’d get if you took Compassionate Conservatism and handed it over for a two-hour blue-sky-thinking, outside-the-box rebranding session at top London ad agency Wanka Gakhead Toss.

God I wish I’d thought of it, though. Not because it’s in any way useful or clever but because had I done so I would now be running a £700,000 think tank like the man who did invent it Phillip Blond. Not only that but I would be the subject of flattering Sunday Times interviews and have the ear of our soon-to-be-prime-minister Dave Cameron and his policy strategist Oliver Wetwin, both of whom apparently believe that the theories underpinning Red Toryism provide the perfect intellectual heft for their plan to heal Broken Britain (TM).

But what are the theories underpinning Red Toryism? That’s the ingenious thing about it. No one really knows. Least of all, I suspect, its creator – former theology lecturer, student of Continental Philosophy and relative of well-hard James Bond actor Daniel Craig – Phillip Blond.

Not unlike “the Third Way”, Red Toryism poses as a kind of political philosopher’s stone – the magic formula which will allow a functioning market economy and social justice to thrive simultaneously.

Actually, as Jamie Whyte points out in the latest issue of Standpoint, it’s nothing but Blairite snake-oil-salesmanship.

[Blond] believes the state should protect local grocers from competition with non-local firms by denying Tesco and its ilk permission to trade. The same goes for capital, which will be have to be raised locally (after it has been redistributed, presumably). Consumers must be obliged to use their local supplier. To prevent monopoly, we must impose it.

This economic Balkanisation, not promoted by most protectionists at the national level, but between — let us say — Exeter and Bristol, is the central policy proposal of Red Toryism. It is the means by which Britain will supposedly be transformed from a “market state” to a “civic state”.

In fact, it is a means by which Britain would be transformed from a rich country to a poor one, as anyone who understands the connection between the scope of trade, the division of labour and wealth creation could tell Blond. Alas, it seems that Blond is doing all the talking and others, including senior Conservatives, are doing the listening. And that is a shame.

After twelve years of Blair and Brown Britain is, I think we can all agree, in the most terrible mess. Our economy is in ruins thanks in good part to an outrageous spree of deficit spending by an irredeemably socialist Chancellor. The tax burden has risen (largely by stealth). Our freedoms have been circumscribed by ever-more-intrusive bureaucracy and legislation, governing everything from how we are allowed to illuminate homes and dispose of our rubbish to the way we arrange our childcare. Health and safety regulations have made harmless, traditional past times like the village fete or the school trip a nightmare of red tape, form filling, overcautiousness and needless expense. Dotted all over Britain are ghettoes – sorry “communities” – a worrying percentage of whose members believe it is their holy duty to destroy us from within, sometimes metaphorically and sometimes literally.

I could go on, but that’s enough for the moment. What leaves me truly gobsmacked is this: that after twelve years of utterly disastrous mismanagement by a ruling caste made up of socialists, liberals, progressives, grievance-mongers, rabble-rousers – all of them on the left, none of them exactly motivated by a desire to make life easier for the silver-spoonfed and privately-educated – there are still pillocks out there so stupid as to believe that the problems of Britain are essentially to do with the facts that people like David Cameron and Boris Johnson went to Eton and Oxford, that some people have more money than others, that some people have bigger houses than other people, and that it’s all jolly unfair.

Get real, you unutterable tossers! Normally I’m quite good with words and insults, but in this instance I find it all but impossible to express how much I despise you for your ignorance, your refusal to see the glaring evidence before you, your chippy repellance, your stale, cliched view of the world, your bitterness, your wrongness and puke-making fatuousness. Go to North Korea, you twonks! Enjoy what it is to be classless and free!

Now the Cameroon analysis of this situation would go something like this: “Aha, so you finally get the problem. Against all reason, there really are still lots of people out there whose analysis of Britain’s problems is rooted in class resentment. Therefore, we can never be as boldly ideological as some of us might like to be. We must catch the monkey softly softly, for example, by adopting fiscally brain-dead policies like sticking to Labour’s 50p upper rate tax band, not because it will bring more money into the Exchequer’s coffers but because it will appeal to the mob’s desire to see rich people suffer.”

Naturally, I disagree. I don’t believe that surrender-monkey nonsense about politics being the “art of the possible.” Anything is possible, but first you have to make your case. The best thing about Conservatism – the reason I’m a conservative – is that the facts of life are Conservative. It’s really not that difficult to argue the conservative position because its also the best position, the one that most accords with reality and human nature. Conservatism is the philosophy of “It’s not where you’re from; it’s where you’re at.” In other words, it doesn’t matter whether you were born in a stately home or the lowest ghetto: a conservative believes as far as is reasonably possible that EVERYONE should be afforded equal opportunities.

But equality of opportunity – note – NOT equality of outcome.

There. I’ve solved the problem of Conservatism and class in one par. Why couldn’t those spineless Cameroons?

By the way, don’t forget to laugh at me being ridiculed in When Boris Met Dave on TV tonight. I really recommend these outtakes too. Especially the ones with me in:

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/when-boris-met-dave/articles/exclusive-video-clips

In what insiders described as “fantastic political theatre”, Mr Johnson clashed repeatedly with his interviewer over his stance on an EU referendum, on his membership of Oxford University’s Bullingdon Club and on David Cameron’s public image.”

Mr Johnson raised the issue of Paxman’s pay, saying: “You are paid elephantine sums by the taxpayer.”

Paxman replied: “If only that were true. You don’t know [what I earn]. I should stop making assertions.”

In unscreened exchanges, Mr Johnson pointed out that Londoners could see how much he earned as Mayor but licence-fee payers were not allowed similar transparency. At one point, Mr Johnson said: “Why don’t you get a proper job?”

When asked about drunken antics in his Oxford days, the Mayor replied: “Ask me a serious question…”

Splendid stuff and I quite agree with those “Mayoral Aides” (Boris?) who are urging that the full interview be put up online.

What interests me especially is the question of Paxo’s alleged £1 million salary. It interests me first as a nosey bastard. It interests me second as a licence-fee payer. But most of all it interests me ideologically.

They can be terribly grand BBC presenter types – the Paxos and Dimblebys – when quizzed about their personal lives. The salary issue, especially, they seem to think is tantamount to asking the Queen whether or not she goes to the loo. And up to a point I agree with them. A BBC political interviewer’s private life, in so far as it does not bear on his public role as frank and fearless interrogator of slippery MPs, is none of our ruddy business.

Where it is our business, though, is in cases like the Paxo/Bozza clash above. The ideological undercurrent to Paxo’s line of questioning (he may not share it but tough: that’s his karmic price for working for the pinko BBC) goes like this: “You are a toffy public school boy. David Cameron is a toffy public school boy. You were both in the Buller. You both earn way, WAY more than the national average. How can throwbacks like you possibly be fit to run modern Britain?”

This tack is outrageous and deserves to be challenged at every turn, as vigorously as possible. (Can you imagine a similar line of questioning being adopted if Boris’s and Dave’s “crimes” were to be, say, black or female or homosexual or physically handicapped?) Boris was quite right to make his response personal, for an ex public schoolboy on a million a year (or whatever Paxo earns) by asking such a question lays himself open to a charge of  hypocrisy.

No more do Boris Johnson’s or David Cameron’s class, background and income rule them out of being great, effective and morally decent politicians than Paxo’s class, background and income rule him out of being a first rate interviewer.

If Paxo wishes to be impertinent (and disingenuous) on this score, then he should damned well expect some impertinence back.

He cites the shocking figure from the Institute for Fiscal Studies that the recession “has wiped out nearly five per cent of our total wealth.” This, he depressingly explains, “means the country is permanently poorer, and will take well over a parliament just to restore its lost wealth.”

Then he tells us why this recession is unique:

“In all previous recoveries, tax revenues have been quickly restored. Not so this time. The Government admits that, even with the economy growing once again, there will still be a gap of £80 billion in 2013 between revenue and spending.”

He goes on to explain why the Brown/Darling quantitative easing programme is merely putting off the hour of reckoning when Britain faces bankruptcy:

“Britain is borrowing proportionately more than any other major economy, and lenders have a galaxy of countries from which to choose. When the Government is unable to print any more new money to buy its own debt, the market will insist on higher long-term interest rates. This will not only make it more difficult to sustain an economic recovery, but it will increase the cost of servicing this debt.”

Finally, he comes up with two very useful ways an incoming administration can rein in public spending.

First, through pensions reform:

“A truly reforming government could set itself the task of abolishing pension poverty by building up a compulsory funded scheme around the current pay-as-you-go state pension. It would mean that today’s workers would have to put more of their pay into savings, but they would own their own assets, and gain a guarantee that no one would retire into poverty.

“Such a reform would see the current £15 billion spent on means-testing for pensioners fall to almost nothing over the decades. Simultaneously, the Government should announce that its only goal in pensions was to secure that decent minimum for everyone, phasing out over a similar period the almost £40 billion taxpayers currently spend each year on subsidising pension savings.”

And second, by slicing several juicy steaks from David Cameron’s most sacred cow, the NHS:

“A similarly radical approach must be imposed on the NHS. While productivity has improved by 23 per cent in the private sector over the past decade, in the public sector it has actually fallen. If the same productivity improvements had been delivered by the NHS, for example, the exact same level of service could have been bought for £26 billion less.

“The radical alternative to an across-the-board cut in NHS services is to insist on the productivity increases that have already been delivered across the private sector. Labour has in the past been almost exclusively concerned about how much money is going into a service. The new politics will focus exclusively on outputs.”

You’ll be reading all this and nodding your head and going: “Oughtn’t all this to be bloody obvious?” And you’re dead right. Nothing Frank Field says in the piece is exactly new or original. But what’s such a breath of fresh air – and why so many of us on both sides of the political divide so love the man – is its clarity, directness and freedom from cant.

Frank Field, let us not forget, is a Labour MP. Yet he has managed to articulate truths which seem to be quite beyond the expressive powers of anyone in Cameron’s Conservative party.

“Bribing voters with their own money is no longer an option,” he says.

Yes, exactly! But how many times have you ever heard any of Cameron’s lot try to articulate the moral and intellectual case against tax and spend?

Seldom, I’m sure. Probably never, because anyone who tried to do so would be quickly gagged under Cameron’s “Don’t say anything that makes us sound like remotely like Tories,” policy.

Yes, sure, both Cameron and Osborne have been dropping one or two hints of late about the necessarily tough fiscal measures they’re going to have to adopt on getting into power; on the amount of hurt they’re going to have to inflict on the electorate.

But what they’ve signally failed to do is indicate they’ve remotely understood the scale of the problem. (If they did, they wouldn’t be talking about ring-fencing spending on the NHS).

Nor does it appear to have occurred to them that, though a cut in public spending could initially be a painful thing, it could also have the most enormous side benefits – not just in restoring public finances but also in freeing citizens from the shackles of the overweening state.

Looking at the list in the papers the other day of some of Cameron’s bright new Conservatives to watch out for, my heart sank, as it so often does these days when contemplating our future leaders.

“You lot,” I thought to myself (and I’ve known some of them personally since Oxford) “Do not have an effing clue. You’re still of the mindset which thinks the most dramatic problems facing the Tory party are things like its stance on homosexuality and green issues.” But the public has moved on; so has the economy. I despair, I really do.