Gosh, David Cameron really is ditching the moderate image and scarpering back to cover his home bases:

Cameron on offensive with call for tax cuts (Daily Telegraph)

Osborne vows to ”˜pick fight’ with Brussels (FT)

This really is tantamount to giving up on trying to win over the moderate voters he would need in order to win a General Election, and just doing what’s necessary to shore up his core vote in order to avoid a meltdown in the Conservative vote.

I have said throughout that I don’t believe all these stage whispers from the new occupant in Downing St about an autumn General Election - mainly because I don’t think Gordon Brown is the sort of man to announce his real future intentions in public in this way - but I admit I have been very slow to work out exactly why he’s doing it.

What it does is force Cameron to abandon his original plan not to say very much for two or three years (most of this Parliament), and just give a general soft hazy warm feeling to appeal to the centre ground, without actually committing himself to very much. (This was broadly speaking the strategy that Tony Blair followed when he was in opposition, or at least Cameron’s interpretation of it.)

But that was all premised on the Conservative Party being willing to back him even if they didn’t agree with the signals he was giving out, on the basis that he was a winner. His problem now is that in the wake of the Brown accession he is behind in the polls and not looking much like a winner - and so parts of his party are not in the slightest bit inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

So if Cameron has to be ready now for an imminent General Election, behind in the polls, then he can’t possibly afford to go into it without having said enough to keep his own traditional Conservative core support happy. What he’s obviously doing now is, in short order, remedying that.

But as a result he now finds himself saying a whole load of things which make him unacceptable to the moderate vote that he would need to win. It will be very difficult indeed for him - at least while retaining any sense of principle - to make any later attempts to move back on to the middle ground.

And I must say that I am among those who have been repelled and generally reminded again of why we don’t want to vote Tory (even apart from Europe, which I think is his most difficult dilemma of all). Talk today, for example, is of opting out of the Working Time Directive. The most prominent consequence of that piece of legislation in the public mind, is I think the end that it brought to hospital doctors working incredibly long hours. Is re-introducing overworked doctors into the NHS really a platform Cameron wants to stand on?

(That tends to be the problem with saying you will tackle ‘red tape’, ‘bureaucracy’, or ‘political correctness’ - it’s all very well to say sweepingly that it needs a swathe cutting through it, but that’s in danger of throwing up some consequences which can be quite politically difficult to advocate.)

It seems to me that Mr Brown is doing just a great job of first creating a problem for Cameron - the sense of momentum following on from his accession - and then exploiting it to drive a coach and horses through Cameron’s strategy, forcing him to create a public image for himself which will make him, when the election does eventually come in a year or two’s time, unelectable.

And the great beauty of it is that Brown is not having to force Cameron to create a false image of himself in order to appeal to his core vote - but the very reverse: as I’ve said before, at a human level Cameron may not be the worst sort of Conservative, but politically he is an old-fashioned anti-European, enthusiastic tax-cutting Tory (and also with a distinctly less-than-spotless record on equalities issues, as Jo Swinson has pointed out).

Brown has forced this real, genuine-article Conservative, against his will, to come out as a Conservative - and in the process remind the country how much it still really doesn’t really like Conservatives very much.