I found this week’s Conservative conference very interesting to observe - not because I thought they managed to establish a new position and momentum for themselves, but in fact because of the very opposite. For the position they were groping towards setting out is all too consistent with what the Conservative party has been saying really ever since Thatcher.

Let me explain.

The developing wisdom seems to be that Osborne’s proposal to restrict Inheritance Tax (IHT) was very clever in winning back more public support, and that alongside a reasonably strong performance from Cameron, they have therefore together re-established the Conservatives somewhere near back where they were before the departure of Blair.

In fact I don’t share the general consensus that the IHT proposal puts the Tories back into the game of winning support from the mainstream: it remains a fact that even at the moment 94% of the public don’t pay IHT, and while aspiration means that something more than just 6% of people are interested in it, cutting the proportion who pay it to just 2% seems to me a very long way from the really ambitious and radically different policies that Cameron knows he needs to win votes form the centre ground.

But more generally I don’t share the analysis that the unstoppable Cameron bandwagon of last year is now back on the rails - for several reasons.

The most transitory reason is the state of the opinion polls of the last couple of days, which do indeed show a revival of Conservative ratings from say a fortnight ago. But I don’t see any evidence at all that this is anything really more than the small bounce that all parties normally get from their conference. Cameron’s bounce may be a bit bigger than, say, this year’s post-conference bounce for the Lib Dems, and it might turn out to last a little, but there is no evidence yet for this.

And I am still completely baffled about how any sensible analysis of whether or not Brown will call a General Election can be based on opinion poll differences of just a few percentage points, at any time but especially at the moment when the polls have been highly volatile over the last few weeks and months. The media, with their famously short time horizons, might feel the need to focus on whatever new development has happened this morning, however trivial, but trivial and impulsive are not words that one readily associates with Mr Brown.

But back to the fortunes of the Conservative party. It seems to me that, in a longer-term view than just a couple of days, the real significance of what has been said and done in Blackpool this week is the Conservatives shoring up their traditional core vote. Cameron might have phrased some of their favourite lines a little differently but I don’t think there can be any real doubt that the general thrust of Conservative direction over the last few weeks has been to appeal to their traditional vote rather than reaching beyond their mainstream traditional support.

And we shouldn’t be in any doubt about what that choice means. It means that Conservative strategy in the 2007 General Election will be the same essentially as it was in the 2005 and 2001 elections: effectively to concede any prospect of actually winning it - which you can only do by trying to win the vote of some of the middle ground as well as your core support - and batten down the hatches and do your best to avoid complete meltdown, by ensuring that at least your core supporters do actually vote for you.

This was the approach behind Michael Howard’s 2005 campaign, and his “dog whistle” issues, and William Hague’s 2001 campaign, based around fighting to keep the pound. The latter was particularly interesting for teaching the Conservatives the lesson that even if you campaign on an issue on which relatively moderate people actually agree with you, they still won’t vote for you if they think you are extreme, and you will be left with just your core support, feeling warm inside, but ultimately lonely.

Indeed it was very interesting to see Hague, even as he made the EU one of the key planks of the Conservative campaign again this week, warning that it needed not to be too prominent in their campaign, saying that they must not “go bonkers” on it. I can’t help wondering what his private views are on the wisdom of running hard again on Europe are.

But Cameron and his strategists clearly have decided that this is going to be a campaign based on shoring up their core support. He might manage to raise his share of the vote by a point or two since 2005 through softer image and language, but he is not going to go seriously after the centre ground - because he has tried that, and it just ended up annoying his members, and tying himself in knots.

So what this means is that this is yet another election where the Conservatives are not actually really going to try to win the election, and (barring surprises, which you never should bar in this game) they will continue to stand back from the real battleground, leaving it open to Labour.

So lucky Gordon? Lucky - not a bit of it.

For if Cameron has made the choice to focus simply on his core support in this election, that was absolutely not the choice he wanted to make. His whole appeal, from his successful Conference speech in the leadership election two years ago, was not to keep the Conservative party in just the same old place. His whole pitch was about modernising it, bringing it on to the centre ground, ands winning new votes. This is what the first eighteen months of his leadership was almost entirely devoted to - and what got him up there in the polls. For almost two years, we knew almost nothing about David Cameron except that he wanted the Conservative party to be different.

The fact that he now finds himself choosing to go into an election on a strategy of appealing to his core vote is almost entirely a tribute to the strategy of the last few months of Mr Brown. I have congratulated him on the success of this before - in essence, by putting our rumours of an early General Election before Cameron was ready for it and before he had any policies or his policy groups had come to their conclusions, he gave Cameron the wobblies. His party started to get nervous, and backed up by the row over grammar schools and the Ealing byelection, they started to worry what sort of modern and strange ideas that that young Mr Cameron who hadn’t really said much yet, really would take them into an election with.

Cameron couldn’t possibly face going into an election without at least his core support - and so he started having to put out all sorts of announcements over the summer reassuring his core supporters. Those old Tory stalwarts tax cuts and bashing Brussels, for example, re-appeared.

These announcements in turns scared off some of those he had been assiduously wooing for more than a year, so he tried to find ways of trimming a little again, with some more moderate announcements.

It started to get quite confusing.

And when his policy reports did appear, they didn’t help: two of the most important ones contradicted each other, forcing him to make his choice between appealing to his core support or to the centre ground very publicly.

In those circumstances, with his poll lead gone, his Harry Potter-like cloak of invincibility gone, and as a result also constrained by the dog whistling he had been doing over the summer, it would have been a very brave, indeed rash, leader, who would have chosen to thrown caution to the winds, risk the wrath of his own party who were now increasingly vocally impatient with what they regarded as some of his funny modern wacky ideas, and still stick to going after the centre ground.

He didn’t: he made the choice that Brown had boxed him into a corner to do, and decided to make the best he could of an election campaign based on an appeal to his core support.

For Cameron and his strategy as leader, this is nothing less than a tragedy.

One of the many ironies of this, I think, is that that the man he claimed to be trying to copy in driving his party to the centre ground would have made the other choice. Whenever he was faced with a choice between quietening his own party, or pleasing what he knew Middle England really wanted, Blair never really wavered. Cameron is more of a Conservative man, and more a prisoner of his own party, than Blair ever was a Labour man, or a prisoner of his. This reinforces the increasingly popular idea, which I have aired here before, that in fact Cameron is more like the Conservative party’s Kinnock than their Blair.

And Blair was no stranger to the kind of manipulation of the opposition that Brown has been up to this summer, even if he went about it slightly differently.

For in many ways the story of British politics over the last ten years has not been one of Labour success, but of how the Labour party has ensured Conservative failure - and of how they have very successfully tied down the Conservative party.

As Labour leader and Prime Minister, Tony Blair’s highest priority, and above even keeping his party quiet, above the interests of the country, was consistently in picking the course of action which would divide and therefore weaken the Conservative party. The 1997 election campaign was perhaps slightly different - the story then really was about a new and fresh leader replacing the tired and sleazy old Tories. But once he reached Downing Street, and in the 2001 and 2005 General Election campaigns, Blair’s guiding principle was to do whatever would shaft the Conservatives. Now Brown is doing it too.

Labour’s victories in 2001 and 2005 have been due largely to successfully forcing the Conservatives off half the battleground.

Will it work for them again in the General Election of 2007?

The current signs are surely promising.