Soft politics is out. Hard politics is back. A looming economic crisis is forcing us all to sort out our priorities. Voters must adjust to dearer food, fuel and mortgages. Politicians must adapt to help them.

That means goodbye to soft options and hello to hard choices, hard truths, hard politics. Out must go quality-of-life indices, politicians telling people how to spend their own money, and expensive, unproven projects to save the world. In are jobs, pay, food and the cost of living.

Politicians need to show that we understand this new reality. Blairite methods are irrelevant at best and are already repelling voters.

The economy is the territory on which the battle for the hearts, minds and votes of middle Britain will now be fought - a great opportunity for the Conservatives. People want to know what can and can't be done about mortgage bills and interest rates, what higher inflation means for them and how much we will all have to pay for Labour's high government borrowing. We must have the guts to tell them.

The defining moment in this shift from soft to hard politics came when Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling announced that they were tearing up the fiscal rules and borrowing more. The public may not know what those rules are but they do know that more borrowing means higher bills. They know Labour has spent too much - only a few years ago it was even training Whitehall bureaucrats how to spend more money.

Mr Brown's economic policies lie in ruins. An early casualty has been consumer and saver confidence. That confidence will take years to restore. It will fall to the Tories to do the job.

It's too early for all the detail on tax and spending priorities. But the Conservative Party can and should now articulate more boldly a language that can win back the trust of the electorate to manage the economy, starting with restoring the country's wrecked public finances. However unpalatable it is, the electorate want the truth.

This new realism in politics is home turf for Tories. It won't be the first time we have had to pay for Labour's excesses. We need to show that we can be creative managers of UK plc, get the State out of the way of those who want to get ahead, make the books balance, spend more wisely and find ways to tax less.

We should not be afraid to be derided as accountants. The first thing the public will want to know from us when we get into office is a hard accounting truth: how much did Labour really spend of our money - and how on earth are we going to pay it all back?

Andrew Tyrie is MP for Chichester and a former Shadow Paymaster General

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