Part of the discussion I had with David Cameron (results available in Company magazine, March issue, on sale at all good newsagents from 13 March) revolved around the Tories’ publication of draft manifesto chapters.

He said:

“We’ve launched it draft chapter by draft chapter, on the internet, with people then coming up with their ideas and their questions. I’ve done online public meetings, the first one I think 40 000 people took part and voted on which questions they wanted answered on their particular subject. So we’ve got a long way to go but I think it’s a world away from what we used to do. And the exciting thing is is it’s totally interactive – it’s driven by what people want to say rather than just being pushed stuff by the politicians.”

I asked him if this was a bit of a cop-out, maybe even played into (unfounded, by the way) accusations that the Conservatives are entirely focus-group driven.  He replied (unsurprisingly…) that he disagreed, because: “The draft manifesto is what we want to do, it’s what we believe in but I think in the modern world of Wikipedia and crowd sourcing and interacvtity it’s only right when you’re asking people and you want to be their government, look here’s our draft manifesto what do you think, what have we left out, what do you most think is your priority? I think it’s a very good and modern way of doing politics.”

At the time, I was a bit sceptical. After all, four years of research, policy work, review and discussion – surely they are ready to make the argument for the policies they believe in? But actually, the more I think about it, and the more I hear about just how fed up of politics as usual voters are, the more I think that if this process is seen to be making a difference, then it can only be a good thing.

After all, we are a representative democracy. Our politicians are supposed to be answerable to us. They are supposed to represent us – not just pass laws from on high.  I do want politicians to listen, and react to what we say.

Remember when Tony Blair was attacked on Newsnight about the 48 hour GP targets – he had absolutely no idea what was going on. He assumed that because his government’s 48 hour target was being met, everything was ticking over nicely. But he was very wrong. Politicians need to work out a way to get the real facts – targets being met did not tell them that the GPs’ surgeries just disconnected the phone once two days’ of appointments had been made.

Gordon Brown is right on one thing: politics is all about choices. But you can’t make an informed choice unless you have enough information, and politicians need to make sure that they can access enough information from sufficiently diverse sources to inform the choices they make in our name.

While it does have to actually make a difference (in my experience, fake concern is worse than no concern at all), I have become a fan of wiki-writing the manifesto.  It’s all part of the post-bureaucratic way of doing things…

The Telegraph has a fantastic article about rubbish in Bali today.

I know – not exactly something you are desperately keen to read over breakfast, but necessary: this recycling plant in Bali takes in 140 lorryloads of waste a week, and only properly throws away 10. This is exactly the kind of thing we need to do more of.

I’ve had my questions over parts of the Conservatives’ plans for local government (why mandate weekly bin collection? Or, while a good thing in itself,  I don’t really understand how freezing council tax centrally for two years is very localist…) but they are really minor quibbles. What I want to see more of is things like George Osborne’s freeing up of councils to reward people who recycle rather than punish those who don’t – because carrots work better than sticks.

I probably recycle about three bags for every two rubbish bags I throw out. I want to recycle more; my council doesn’t do most plastics, for example, and I would really like them to take food waste separately. I also want supermarkets to reduce their packaging, and I want them to take back their excess without argument – I do feel a bit of a loon unwrapping things at the checkout sometimes. And you should hear the shock when I buy vegetables without a plastic bag…

Even if you don’t subscribe to man-made climate change as a theory, we do all want to reduce the cost of our consumption and maintain a clean environment. Schemes like the one in Bali work because they were local initiatives to solve a problem; it has resulted in jobs and in cleaner surroundings. Of course there are problems translating it directly to the UK. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

A report out today has calculated that the bankers’ bonus tax will raise around £2 billion more than initially thought.

While this begs a number of questions (who got the initial calculations THAT wrong? Why were the banks so focused on short-term gain that they didn’t delay their bonus payments? Why were the banks able to pay such high bonuses if they were really in such trouble? And so on…) the really big question is this: what will the government do with the money?

Will they put it into the general spending pot? Will they use it in a pre-election bribe budget? Or will they do the responsible thing and use it to start paying down our deficit?

This is something to watch for. It’s an indicator of whether the money markets and voters are able to believe Gordon Brown when he talks about making the right choices.

For a while now, all we’ve heard from the Tories has been a bit gloomy. And with good reason – that second look at Gordon Brown is not a happy one.

But this afternoon in Brighton, it seems to all be coming together. William Hague’s speech was a classic tour de force. He set out the very stark choice we face: change or ruin.

Audible gasps of shock in the audience accompanied his revelation that Britain was 4^th in the world for tax and regulation – and now is 84^th and 86^th. This is not something people can vote for.

But crucially, instead of merely bashing Brown and setting out the dire state we are in and the dire measures needed to fix the problems, William, Andrew Lansley, Oliver Letwin, Phillip Hammond, Ken Clarke and most convincingly George Osborne then laid out just why those measures are needed – because there is a point to all the pain. There will be an end to it. And when we are at the end, we will have a far better country. One where life will be improved, where our NHS can do its best, where our schools can beat the world, where our environment can be saved, where our government does its job properly and gives people value for the money that they hand over to it, where the energy, resourceful inventiveness and essential good nature of our fellow countrymen can flourish.

No-one would want to vote for a party that simply gives up and says ‘all is lost’. People want to vote for something, and the only way to persuade people to vote for the frankly unpleasant task ahead is to give them a reason to do so. That message of hope is what David Cameron does best.

It will not be easy. But the message coming out from this weekend is simple: we are a country worth fighting for. The party that has the ideas to change the country is the Conservative Party. It is not going to be easy but the change will come, and the effort is worth it.

On Saturday night, I half-watched Wargames again. I am betraying my weakness for 80s teen American films here – I hadn’t seen it for years (Film 4 are also doing an 80s season at the moment – it’s like being back at school! Look out for Local Hero in particular.)

Wargames when I first saw it was a seriously geeky film about a geeky boy doing geeky things and saving the world from nuclear destruction and I wasn’t really that interested in it (I am not a very sophisticated film watcher – my favourite film of all time remains the Sound of Music.) However, last night, I realised the political point of the film.  As the military and the boy are fighting to regain control of WOPR, the machine learns that there is no winner in nuclear war and therefore the only way to win is not to play.

So far, so obvious (and indeed spelled out on the screen). Today I’ve been catching up on a few bits and pieces of non-headline news including coverage of the Tories’ death tax posters and related blogs.  Which have brought me to the firm conclusion that the only way to win this election is not to play by the rules set by the other side.

I have said before that this is going to be probably the dirtiest election ever fought. I have also said that I want to win it because we have the right ideas, not just because we’re not Gordon Brown. And I have said before that I don’t like politicians setting up straw-men in order to lie about their opponents.

So here is the thing. If politicians want to start to repair the terrible damage that they have done to our politics (and I mean politicians of all parties. Conservatives in the 90s with sleaze; early Blair for promising the moon on a stick, and late Blair for lying about our national security; Brown for nearly bankrupting us and finally many many lesser-known politicians for their expenses), they need to radically change the way they behave. They need to show that they are better than the public’s view of them. Continuing this endless cycle of ‘you are secretly thinking this’, ‘you actually want to eat babies’, ‘you want everyone to wear a Mao suit and hand over everything to the state from birth’ is turning more and more people off. Unless it changes, fewer and fewer people will vote and our politics will be ever more damaged by it.

WOPR learned. Politicians need to: negative campaigning turns people off. They need a reason to vote for you, not just against the rest. If for no other reason than that one day, you’re ‘the rest’ instead.