To judge from the headlines that he got, David Cameron’s message last week was resoundingly clear: I want to follow where Tony Blair has led and I don’t care how angry this makes Lord Tebbit. But today’s arcane political game being what it is, there was a multi-layered meaning to that landmark speech (delivered, with heavy symbolism, to a Blairite think tank) and the row that followed it.

Cameron did indeed say something that sounded like “Blairism good”, “right-wing critics bad”, but his praise for the prime minister was in fact deeply ironic: Blair was worthy of the Conservatives’ admiration precisely to the extent that he had ripped them off in the first place. So congratulations, Mr Blair, for realising that the Tories were right all along and for reinventing your neanderthal party in the image of that truly great moderniser, Margaret Thatcher.

That is exactly what so many critics on the right have been demanding from the new Tory leader: an acknowledgment of the true value of the Thatcher inheritance. Don’t renounce the past, they said, reclaim it. So maybe Cameron is, on the quiet, a real Tory. Maybe the “modernising” pitch is not an abandonment of principle but a liberation from a misleading and unpopular image.

However, a series of lunchtime discussions that I convened at the Centre for Policy Studies over the past six months suggests another, less optimistic interpretation. Participants in these discussions included MPs from almost all factions and persuasions within the Conservative party and representatives from the think tanks Civitas, Policy Exchange, Reform, Centre for Social Justice and the CPS itself. What we found was an almost universal readiness among Tory MPs to abandon Conservative doctrines that had proved costly at the polls. If this retreat from conviction — rather than a genuine desire to create a positive alternative to Labour — is the motive behind the party’s eagerness to adopt a “modernising” agenda then the voters will almost certainly sense it.

Perhaps unsurprisingly our think tank representatives were generally more radical — but not necessarily more right wing — than the MPs who believed themselves to be constrained by the limits of what they saw as electorally prudent. This political caution or “realism” tended to err on the side of retrenchment from what are often seen as traditional Conservative objectives such as reducing the role of the state. There seemed to be an assumption that talk of a smaller state frightened voters who saw it as code for cuts in provision, or privatisation. There was little appetite for educating public opinion in the realities of, for example, European models of healthcare based on mixed funding or government regulated social insurance.

To put it bluntly, a large proportion of the parliamentary party seems to have lost its nerve for proposing any reform of public services or taxes and benefits that threatens to cause public alarm — even when that alarm is based on economic illiteracy or practical ignorance. This could mean that the modernising programme of the new leadership will amount to little more than a way of pandering to an almost superstitious level of anxiety on the part of the electorate.

If this proves to be true then the chance will have been lost to offer truly progressive solutions to Britain’s systemic problems. Cameron’s critique of Blairism is that it has failed to produce the neo-Thatcherite goods that its rhetoric promised: only the Conservatives — the real bearers of that flame — can follow through with the reforms that new Labour claims to endorse. But I wonder if Cameron is fully aware of how many of his MPs welcome “modernisation ” as a cover for defeatism.

A stunning example came in our discussion on the family. Several of our think tank representatives had been involved in research that showed definitive damage to the community and to children’s welfare as a consequence of family breakdown and the rise of single parenthood. They said children raised by lone parents did demonstrably worse in terms of educational attainment, social adjustment and likelihood of criminal offending than those raised by two parents.

Their research showed that the tax and benefit system was now heavily prejudiced against two-parent families — both married and unmarried — and that it positively incentivised single parenthood, thus directly contributing to many of Britain’s most serious social problems. Despite accepting the arguments and the evidence, almost all the MPs believed that any alteration in tax and welfare arrangements would be politically unacceptable (which is to say, would involve too high an electoral risk). They were adamant that any move by the Conservatives to alter this state of affairs would be reminiscent of what was seen as the party’s “victimising of single mothers”.

Oddly, at the time that this discussion took place, all the contenders in the party leadership election (including Kenneth Clarke who had, as chancellor, presided over the abolition of the marriage tax allowance) were explicitly advocating changes in the tax and benefit system to support married (or “stable”) families. And yet none of the MPs present was prepared to defend such a stance, believing that, as one put it, it would be “unsellable on the doorstep”.

This reluctance to revisit themes that MPs believed to have been politically damaging, even when social conscience, indisputable evidence and common sense fairness were at stake, was quite startling. In this area, at least, MPs could be modernisers by default having lost heart over defending, or making the case for, their own values.

Cameron is putting forward a narrative that could be compelling: since Thatcher’s time, Conservatives have been the truly courageous modernisers; Blair understood this but his party would not allow him to make meaningful reforms to public services and the welfare system. But if Tory modernisation simply amounts to a retreat from anything that might conceivably disturb voters by introducing novel solutions or challenging established (failing) formulas, then Cameronism could prove as lame as Blairism.

Janet Daley’s paper, What Does Modernisation Mean? is published by the Centre for Policy Studies today

Minette Marrin is away