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.

Gordon Brown is apparently to list out the ‘non-financial’ state assets which he wants to sell off to help pay our debts.

I don’t have any ideological objection to this (indeed, I question why on earth the state owns such things as motorway service stations and the Tote) but what does worry me is whether these are being sold at the best time… remember when our gold was sold off?

I’m also concerned that he’s not selling the right assets – I would have assumed his priority would be to get taxpayers’ money out of the banks, no? Again it may not be the right time to do that, but we won’t actually know when is because so little information is available.

And I question whether selling things like the Channel Tunnel and the government’s stake (is it a controlling one?) in a uranium processing plant is wholly in the long-term national interest.

The end of the news report says that Brown is trying to create a clear dividing line between Labour who ‘won’t’ cut, and the Tories who will. As ever I suspect this is utter tripe – they will cut, we would cut, and it’s up to the electorate to decide who they trust to make the best of a very bad job. After all, unlike Yvette Cooper, I don’t want to hurt anyone and I expect that George Osborne will do his best to make sure that the cuts we would make are fair, proportionate and sensible.

Actually on reflection, I think the great success of our conference last week was to set out a programme of necessary cuts (admittedly only the first round, but a clear sense of direction and attitude) which a) Labour could not take advantage of by baying ‘baby-eating Tories’ and b) the voting public clearly recognise are required.

George’s speech (fair, stern, in it together) was excellent. I’ve always been a huge fan of George’s political brain. I want a Chancellor to think about his policies in human terms – and that means a political Chancellor, not just one who can read sheets of figures.

I was sitting between two men who you might call of a traditional Tory build for part of the speech. They were very keen on cutting Whitehall by a third. But interestingly their most vocal support after a moment’s thought came for the proposal to protect those public servants earning under £18,000 a year but to freeze the pay of the rest for a year.

All the proposals in the speech add up to around £7  billion. George acknowledges himself that that’s not the end of it. But we know the direction of travel and importantly we know the way that the planning will be done – sharing the burden, protecting the poorest, ensuring that the recovery when it comes is sustainable.

I heard an interesting interpretation though: the media are now complaining of too much detail (that’s a new one!) and more importantly of not enough cuts. Has George managed to flip the media into doing some of the hard slog of instilling the need for deficit reduction?

UPDATE at 6.30pm: ConservativeHome’s kind link suggests that I am criticising George for giving too much detail. This is absolutely not what I’m saying. I mention that I have heard that criticism, but more importantly noting the suggestion that the narrative now seems to be one of not enough cut – in other words, media questioning is now focusing on ‘if the situation is this bad, why aren’t you going further?’ which would seem to me to be a revolution in terms of the national mood…

No, David, this isn’t going to be yet another of my doom and gloom, we’re all bankrupt posts…

Last week Gordon Brown announced a variety of policies in his conference speech. Some were good so let’s give him some credit: well done for nicking our idea of recalls for MPs. And I’m pleased that Labour are slowly slowly slooooowly inching back from ID cards – but honestly, I wish they would just get on with it. It would do them a lot more good.  An all elected House of Lords – tick.

Some were appalling – when did Britain turn into the Handmaid’s Tale with ‘foyers’ full of unmarried mothers?

Some were bonkers – how on earth does he think he can instil morals into markets? People, yes; society, yes – but markets? And anyway a new law on bonuses isn’t the way to do that.

Some were unbelievable – do we really think this government is capable of paying off debt?

And some were just ridiculous. As in worthy of ridicule. Like the abolition of charges for personal care and for parking at hospitals. In an ideal world these are absolutely policies I’d support – but there are two problems here. One is we aren’t in an ideal world and there isn’t any money. The other – which for a change is a bigger one – is that the announcement is coming from the centre but the money is going to have to be found locally. There’s no more central money – so any savings which hospital trusts make locally will have to go into meeting these two new pledges.

So the number two problem then divides again. One, I think those sorts of decisions are best made by local communities, deciding together what’s best for them.  Two, I thought we were supposed to be saving money to pay down the debt? That’s not what this sounded like at all.

Fundamentally, while I thought the speech itself was better delivered than normal, and had some pretty good sections (liked the bit about Labour’s achievements,; impressed by the fact that Brown has realised that elections are about the future not the past; thought the anti-Tory sections were better than normal though that’s not saying much), it was just the same old, same old. He spent money he doesn’t have, he thinks he can say ‘do!’ and everything will change, and he thinks people will believe him when the evidence of their own eyes is the opposite.

Or instead of reading all of this, you could just go and read the Guardian’s between the lines of the speech. Brilliant.

I went to the Lib Dem conference in 2004. It was in Bournemouth and it was my first ever political conference. I hasten to add that I was sent there officially by the Tory party – but I came back having filleted a few ideas from the mish mash that they had proposed.

Sadly by that point the Tories’ overall direction was pretty much set in stone. This time though it could all be so different.

Let’s go back to the rationale for Eric’s love-bombing. If someone cares about civil liberties, social mobility and opportunity, aspiration, the environment… they could vote Lib Dem and risk having a Labour government (especially if Nick Clegg, Vince Cable and Ming Campbell get their way). Or they could vote Conservative this time and make sure that there’s a loud and decisive voice saying to the Tory party ‘THIS is what we want’ and we expect you to deliver.

So that’s one side of the equation. What about the other side? Should the Conservatives be looking at some of the Lib Dems’ policy ideas?  I think so. Not all, not many, but some could have some roots in sensible ideas.

In an ideal world, we might want to look at their proposals to take all income under £10,000 out of the tax system. Apparently that would cost £22 billion, so won’t be happening tomorrow.

But – maybe, like Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare proposals, the upfront cost actually saves the Exchequer money in the long run. For example, people earning under £10,000 a year will get at least some of the 50-odd types of benefit currently on offer. As we all know only too well from the spectacularly untrustworthy EU accounts, every time you administer money, you lose some of it.  So maybe leaving it where it began – in people’s pockets – means it will achieve more than it could by going to the government and then back again.

I don’t know. I don’t know the figures. But in principle, I think this is an idea we could look at, especially if introduced with the IDS proposals. It’s simplification, it’s giving people more responsibility, it’s removing complicated backwards and forwards – it’s very new Tory.