Ordinary British citizens are exasperated with contemporary politics: they voted in Mrs Thatcher to revive the economy and New Labour to revive the public sector, and now neither the market nor the state seems to work.

The free market has hugely enriched the top 10 per cent and forced everybody else to work harder for less money while our public services subject us to ever larger amounts of taxation for an ever more incompetent service.

The trouble for Cameron is that he has aligned himself with the New Labour project just as the voters have so demonstrably rejected it. Indeed, until Brown's 'election that never was' fiasco in the autumn, the Conservatives were essentially just promising to deliver - in a more professional and competent manner - an entirely New Labour agenda.