On Friday the Conservatives launched a major advertising campaign and I think it’s quite an interesting milestone for showing where they have now got to in the development of “Cameron’s Conservatives”.

The top slogan for the campaign is “You can get it if you really want”, with ten individual promises in specific areas: health, schools, immigration etc.

This structure has taken some flak, for example from the Guardian, for emphasising different messages to different groups of people: so for example the immigration ad has gone in the Daily Mail, crime in the Sun and the education one in the Guardian.

This has been picked up by some (though not quite as explicitly as this by the Guardian) as further evidence that Cameron is willing to be all things to all men.

This doesn’t seem to me to be quite the right analysis.

Firstly, all political parties - indeed all of us all the time - say different things to different groups of people, without that meaning that we are inconsistent. It is hardly unreasonable for a party seeking to win votes to emphasise to particular groupings, their policies that they think will be of particular interest to that group. When this becomes a problem is when these messages are either explicitly or implicitly contradictory to each other, or (to a lesser degree) when it’s not possible to discern a linking thread between them.

Secondly it’s all very well to dismiss, for example, talking about education to Guardian-readers - but the actual messages they are putting across there are not the stereotypical messages you would expect Guardian-readers to love: the first headline here talks about splitting children up by ability (not quite the comprehensive ideal) and the second one emphasises discipline. These ideas may be right or they may be wrong - and the Conservatives obviously think they will appeal to Guardian-readers - but they cannot be dismissed as simply pandering to the lefty prejudices which this group of people are commonly supposed to have.

In fact this campaign seems to me quite a good one and, as far as it goes, likely to be effective for the Conservatives.

There is a simple and very clear core proposition: you can get it if you really want. The wording of this may not be Shakespeare but it expresses very clearly one idea: ambition - while also reminding people that if they want things to improve then they can’t simply sit around and wait for it to happen: they actually need to go out and put in a bit of effort to bring it about - by voting Conservative.

I like this latter sting in the message: if they are actually to get people to vote for them, then Conservatives absolutely need to remind people that they themselves need to do something, even if it’s only by making a decision to vote for them.

The ”˜ambition’ message is pretty content-lite. I confess I haven’t really been following the US elections as obsessively as most UK politicos seem to have been doing, but it seems to me to be similar to Barack Obama’s pretty content-lite message of change and ambition of “Change we can believe in” (and I’m sure I’ve heard him wowing audiences to join him in saying “Yes we can” - unless I’m misremembering that and confusing it with Bob the Builder…).

But “you can get it if you really want” is a good simple message for a political party to aim to get across to voters, and seems to me to build quite well on - though it is certainly different from - Cameron’s general message to date to voters of “I’m making the Conservative Party less nasty than it used to be”.

The ten specific area messages which hang beneath this overall slogan seem to be quite well done too. For each area: housing, work, the environment or whatever, there is a very specific message, with a brief bit of blurb and a few further specific proposals lying behind it. Each top line, I guess, is meant to embody not only the specific policy but the general approach that a Cameron government would take in that area.

The way this is presented on the Conservatives website does this very well too I think. A large problem with including any kind of policy message in a campaign is that most people’s interest in it extends only to a few words, but actually explaining it usually takes a bit more than that, and if you don’t include some detail then you are accused of being vacuous and not really knowing what it is that you are proposing.

The internet is ideal for addressing this problem, allowing you to make one big banner headline (in this case “you can get it if you really want”), with subsidiary messages (the ten policy areas) with individual words more or less prominently displayed, and then further detail on each available if you click through further (in this case about 100 words of text containing 4 or 5 further specific proposals, and finishing up with a short quote from the spokesperson).

The overall effect is to maintain one very clear message that the Conservatives want us to get: we can improve your country but only if you help us - while addressing the criticism that they have no specific proposals by making one in each of ten major areas - which on closer inspection for the policy geek who’s really interested, turns out to be about 4 or 5 proposals in each specific area.

This latter approach clearly does something which Cameron needs to do, at this stage in his leadership, filling in some policy detail.

So is campaign the pivotal moment, when criticism of Cameron as being just lightweight, not having any policies and not knowing what he actually stands for, comes to an end?

No, it isn’t.

The proposals in the ten areas are ten things that voters may say they want: they push the “we’re on your side” message.

But they remind me very much of the ten things that the Liberal Democrats made our top lines in the run up to the last General Election. They too made individual proposals in individual specific areas - in our case they were each structured as something the government was doing that we oppose, paired with an alternative of something specific that we were proposing.

The individual elements of this decade were popular, and polled very well. Undoubtedly some voters, for whom one particular proposal is their major issue, swung their vote on the strength of that one being included.

But what they didn’t do was give an overall picture of what a Liberal Democrat government would do in policy areas that weren’t covered by one of the ten named proposals - an idea of actually what we were about, as a party.

This Conservative campaign seems to me to suffer from a similar problem. As far as I can see, their ten sets of specific proposals are not mutually contradictory or do not imply fundamentally divergent approaches.

But what they also don’t do is express a fundamental underlying approach of Cameron’s Conservatives. Beyond their desire to say things that are popular, one of which is that they themselves as a party have changed, what do these messages actually have in common, as an approach? I don’t see much of an ideological linkage between them.

If there is an underlying message that the Conservatives seem to want you to take away from the set of ten proposals as a whole, it is that “we will do things that will help you” - stopping you having to pay stamp duty, for example, or paying you a higher state pension.

But this is not really a useful message about what they would do in government: giving out sweets is the easy bit of government: the difficult part, the part that makes it meaningful, is the choices that you make in order to make that possible. I do not expect any political party to go out of its way to advertise the negative or unpopular aspects of its policies, but too many of these bits of text (some are better than others) say nothing about the approach they would take to the important choices, and therefore what the meaningful elements of Cameron’s approach to government would be.

As one illustration of this, on my calculation at least three of their headlines are about increasing spending by government, and two entail reducing taxes - and a further one promises to reduce borrowing, so that is not an available source to plug the gap between these two sets of pledges. (The other four are primarily about how we do things, rather than how much we spend on them).

While all this remains unclarified - I suspect mostly because it is unclear in the minds of those behind it, rather than because they are deliberately attempting to conceal it - we are not a whole lot closer to knowing what a Cameron government would really be about.

An important background to all this, it seems to me, remains the comparison with Blair in the 1990s which the Cameroonies are seeking to emulate. I have outlined before what I think is the fundamental flaw in this approach: Blair’s job in the 1990s was to convince us that he was really not a Socialist. He succeeded - because indeed he really wasn’t one. But Cameron really is a Tory. He might have one or two gay friends, and he may not be the most selfish kind of Old Conservative. But fundamentally he really is, in every way, a Conservative (and I don’t think he or anyone else would claim to argue anything different).

Another key element of Blair’s success was in his attempt to get over a very similar message to Cameron through this campaign, that he is on our side and in government will do things to help us. After 18 years of Conservative government, in 1997 we believed that this fresh new Labour leader actually would do things to help us - and I think this faith was in many way justified by his ten years in Downing Street.

But here again I think the emulation of Blair that Cameron would like us to see in him, doesn’t hold up. Yes, I daresay that if the Conservatives have made a specific promise to “stop the closure of A&E and maternity units” as this campaign does, then they would implement that measure.

But three years into a Conservative government, say, when these initial pledges are delivered, do you really have a sense that the Conservatives would be doing things to help you - that they would preventing any cuts in the NHS, and investing more, say?

I certainly don’t have that confidence, and I don’t think that most voters do either.

What are the underlying principles that would guide a Cameron government? And if you can discern them, are you confident that they are those of a new Tory party which is now “on your side”, rather than old-fashioned Tory instincts?

Beneath these specific proposals, and some excellent presentation, this campaign shows that Cameron’s Conservatives still not yet really any clearer about what they are really about - and still less that they are new and different from the old Conservative party.