A Conservative government would radically change where Britain spends the £7.8 billion aid planned for next year. It is hard to see how it would not, in essence, cut the total, for all the assertions to the contrary — but if this is because of a diversion to Afghanistan and Pakistan, it would be right.

There is no question that poor countries have been hit very hard by the past year’s crisis. Any cut in aid always causes a jolt or trauma, which anyone would want to minimise. But yesterday’s call by Andrew Mitchell, the Shadow Development Secretary, for a hard stocktaking is right. In the 12 years since Tony Blair created the Department for International Development (DfID), the list of projects has inevitably accumulated enthusiasms whose purpose has faded, as well as outright mistakes. It is ridiculous that Britain’s aid has been divorced from its foreign priorities to keep it “pure”, the DfID’s founding principle. Projects have become sacrosanct, along with the target of spending 0.7 per cent of gross domestic product.

Clare Lockhart, a lawyer who spent years advising the Afghan Government, speaks sharply, for instance, of the perverse effect of the Millennium Development Goals to reduce poverty. They are the cherished legacy of Kofi Annan as UN Secretary-General, regarded as unchallengable by much of the aid community. “They focus on primary education, not the secondary education which Afghanistan also desperately needs,” she said. “You can’t have a nurse, a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, who left school at 11. For Afghanistan, it’s a lost generation.”

Labour and the Conservatives have so far felt that preserving the budget trumps the scramble for cost cuts. There have been enough impassioned speeches from Gordon Brown and from Blair that I, for one, would accept their claims that aid is a personal cause. David Cameron’s pledge to ring-fence the budget has been an oddity: a small, hard nugget of a promise falling too early out of the policy fog. It is hard, yet, to discern anything but a quick bid to buy the label “compassionate”.

An easy evasion of that promise was always evident: to divert more to “Afpak”. Those who think this a proxy for war funding will call it a cut and, in a sense, it is. Projects will help the military effort; their success will depend on its progress. It is very different from helping, say, Uganda. It will take cash from old causes. But the Government has already begun this switch, and quite right, if late. The “Afpak” problem demands development aid.

Mitchell yesterday gibed that Britain gave “millions” to Russia, which no longer needs it. His figures are unfair. The DfID stopped direct aid two years ago, and gives cash now through the World Bank and others partly to prod Russia to become a better donor itself. And projects take time to stop. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has persisted with a similar oddity: spending an astounding 40 per cent of its budget on Russia two years ago, although it is now just a third.

The line of challenge is right, though, and overdue. Britain’s foreign policy has changed hugely in the eight years since 9/11, never mind the past twelve. The world economy has changed in the past year. To do the most good, Britain’s aid needs to change too.

Times Recommends

• Bank charges hit us for being human
• Sorry, Father, thou still shalt not steal
• The shed where Santa’s failures go to die