Honestly, we're not that nasty anymore

It was reported at the weekend that Conservative spin doctors had briefed their MPs to go easy on the Labour Party in order not to appear too vindictive and haughty. Well, the message clearly never found its way to the conference exhibition, where blazer-clad moustaches and blue-rinsed cardigans are lining up to buy their Labour’s Not Working postcard sets. The circus is clearly in town. You can buy posters and T-shirts saying “Big Government, Big Problems” and “Red is Dead”.

Lifesized cut-outs of David Miliband advertise free bananas. There is even a coconut shy where delegates can throw balls at pictures of Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling. But the cabinet has, by and large, refrained from joining in the partisan pie-throwing. Even clown prince Boris Johnson avoided making any jabs at the Prime Minister’s expense in his speech on Sunday, with only one reference to the Labour Party and another to his former opponent Ken Livingstone.

Which is not to say the Conservatives aren’t criticising the government. George Osborne’s talk of the Brownian “age of irresponsibility” in his speech yesterday will no doubt be a catchphrase of the 2010 election. But the focus is clearly on attacking the government’s record rather than its individuals. It’s a strategy that both assuages swing voters’ concerns about “The Nasty Party” and allows the Tories to show that their ambitions are set on government and not on opposition.

There are signs it’s beginning to work, too. Theresa Villiers’ announcement yesterday that the government will build a high speed train line from London to Leeds was that rare thing – a concrete, sensible Conservative policy pledge. Osborne’s promise to freeze council tax for two years could have been a classic Brown budget flourish – a gift to the taxpayer, and relatively inexpensive as tax pledges go (£1.5bn, to be recouped by cutting advertising and consultancy costs).

While the Tories’ pledges do not yet add up to a coherent manifesto, they are at least evidence of a government-in-waiting attempting to give its MPs and councillors some policy to go back to their constituents with. It must be difficult, as an active Conservative, to promote your party’s policies when its leaders have mostly defined themselves in opposition to the government.

This is where Gordon Brown’s tub-thumping anti-Tory speech last week failed. Of course it would have been difficult for Brown not to raise the spirits of the Labour brothers and sisters with a little of the rhetoric of old, especially given the bad press the Prime Minister has received of late. And yes, the line on novices got all the headlines, as much for its relevance to his own party than for its meaning for the Conservatives. But by basing the most powerful section of his speech on an attack on the Tories, didn’t Brown cast himself and his party as the opposition?

Little by little, Cameron’s Conservatives are doing the opposite – understudying the role of government with increasingly realistic policy pledges. And the bewhiskered delegates in the conference hall with their “I Heart DC” lapel badges are beginning to believe the impossible – that in 18 months time, the party might just find themselves in the lead role.