I have heard and read some ambitious things here in Birmingham. Well, two ambitious things. The first was when the Bishop of Birmingham told delegates at the Conservative Party conference that he greeted them “in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ”. It was as though he and the Son of God had been speaking just that morning and JC had said to the Bish: “Do say hello to the Tories from me.”

The second, slightly less far-reaching idea, was unveiled when the Shadow Schools Secretary and my fellow Times columnist, Michael Gove, invited despairing Blairites to discover a new radical home in the Conservative Party.

I waved back to the Lord and then asked myself what might a Blairite, if anyone other than Lord Adonis can be found bold enough to wear the description, make of the new Conservatives this week? Would it be the kind of reforming, forward-looking party that such an imagined person might like?

The first thing to say is that I had nearly forgotten, in the years since 1988, what a Conservative Party with its tail up was like. But I did remember enough to know that it was nothing like this. That was the time of Norman Tebbit, raw and insurrectionary, the era of scapegoats and enemies.

Well who wants those days back? Or rather, who wants those days back and is likely to read my columns? No one. David Cameron has been courageous and skilful in creating a party at whose conference even the portraits of Mrs T now look out of place. And he has been sensible in handing few hostages to fortune by over-developing policy in the long years before an election.

But those long years are nearly over; the Ming vase (in Roy Jenkins's famous metaphor) has almost been carried to the end of the overpolished floor. And yet, still, the Tory party spokesmen don't seem to realise what this means; don't seem to comprehend that they must have a view about Britain's future and the difficult choices to be made.

I exempt columnist Gove. His proposal for allowing anyone who wants, and is able to, to start up and run a school is very brave and very difficult to do. It would be expensive. It would be opposed by many of those whose votes the Conservatives are seeking. The NASUWT teaching union described Mr Gove's vision as “mad, bad and dangerous”, which is a great phrase, except that it was originally applied to one of our most popular (and attractive) poets.

Mr Gove is a neocon, and his stance on foreign affairs might appeal to Blairites. But I am not at all sure that the new Conservatism isn't better represented by Boris Johnson, affable, tolerant, comfortable, the man who supported the Iraq War before it happened, and then wanted to impeach Tony Blair when it all got tough. We'll have to see.

Of course, there is the occasional bat-squeak of ancient instincts, as when Dominic Grieve, the Shadow Home Secretary, took a rather irrelevant swipe at the weekend at a concept of multiculturalism that no one has held for a decade, or when DC unhelpfully told the obese that they were fat lumps who should pull their acts together. But these are the exceptions.

What is Tory policy for the future of the NHS? To nuzzle the ears of the doctors and to stop targets. That's it. While we are being reminded of what an extravagant old roué Gordon Brown is, perhaps we should recall the recent Tory slogan: “Stop the NHS Cuts”. More money, no targets.

Yesterday I listened to the Shadow Housing Minister, Grant Shapps. Personable. Plausible. Hugely important portfolio. “We will be the change that housing needs,” he told his conference. And how would he do this? He would do away with stamp duty for a period (whoops, there goes Prudence), he would, in unspecified ways, “support community land trusts”, get rid of home information packs and “today I can announce the setting up of a working group of experts”. (Applause.) Whoopyding, Grant. Three million houses short and you'll set up a panel of experts.

Half of new Conservative policy seems simply to consist of not doing things. They earned their green tree yesterday not with green taxes (George Osborne instead pledged the scrapping of higher fuel taxes and the tax on gaz-guzzlers) but by deciding not to build the third runway at Heathrow. This got them immediate plaudits from Greenpeace and lost them nothing, because the impact on Britain's economy will not be felt for a while. But it will be felt, I confidently predict. Even using their dubious figures, 60 per cent of the anticipated demand for the third runway will not be catered for by their new high-speed railway.

So, gullible greens placated, Nimbys ecstatic, consequences deferred. And the same pattern when it comes to economic stewardship. It was clever of Mr Osborne to elide the banking crisis - a crisis in a sector in which the Conservatives have always favoured deregulation - with Mr Brown's public spending record. They in fact have nothing to do with each other, but it was a nice bit of politics.

But what about the “doing” bit? Here the idea of a quango, the Office for Budget Responsibility, which will statutorily embarrass the government out of spending and taxation decisions that it might otherwise want to take, feels like a super wheeze, a way of avoiding making any long-term commitments about anything. Possibly for ever.

Naturally, one must ask what a “balanced budget” means. Over how long? Would we rather, say, have a painful recession than an unbalanced budget? And, if we're going to have such an office, what on earth is the point of committing to anything - high-speed rail link, council tax cuts, fuel tax cuts - that the office might condemn? As for “we'll get it out of the advertising bill”, most of that expenditure is about telling people what is available to them from government agencies. How will the Tories let them know? Mind-melding?

Yesterday, Harriett Baldwin, the candidate for the safe Tory seat of West Worcestershire, was on one of the panel sessions. As it happens a past MP for part of that constituency was another Baldwin: Stanley. On the excellent Conservative Party archive stall I bought a facsimile of the Tory election poster for 1929. Baldwin was then Prime Minister and the poster showed a pipe with the legend “Smoke Baldwin's Security Mixture”, which consisted of, among other things, “Safeguarding”, “Peace in Industry”, “Rating Reliefs” and “Emigration schemes”.

Smoke Cameron's Security Mixture. Vote for a party that the Archbishop of Canterbury could be happy in: tolerant, complacent in the best sense, slightly sanctimonious, Establishment, half-full of ineffectual piety. The Conservatives are conservative again. Ready, once more, to manage decline. Vote weed.

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