There was a period last year when I had a series of dreams about David Cameron. Like addicts who only have the strength to admit to their weakness once they are on the road to recovery, I only feel strong enough now to tell you this in print.

In the first dream, I was walking around the expansive gardens of a grand porticoed stone house in Gloucestershire, surreptitiously trying to peer in at the windows. Suddenly I became aware that it was Mr Cameron's house. A butler appeared and asked whether I would like a tour. I demurred, a little horrified to have been found peeking.

In the second dream, I met a child with her nanny in a park in London. It turned out to be Mr Cameron's daughter, who is roughly the same age as mine. The nanny invited us back for tea. I was sitting uncomfortably in the sitting room when the kids started arguing upstairs. With the nanny busy in the kitchen, I went up to sort it out. While up there I heard the front door bang; Mr Cameron was back. I was absolutely mortified that he might find me in his house.

The third dream merely amounted to an invitation to lunch by Mr Cameron. In a restaurant, not his house. And then they died out, roughly around the time I stopped believing that the new Conservatives believed in anything coherent at all. I haven't had a dream about Mr Cameron, serf-like or not, for a few months now.

I wish I could say the same about the rest of the country, which seems to be suspended in a state of vague fantasy about the Cameron Conservatives (are they still compassionate? I have lost track); hoping they will be OK, but not quite sure. And how can anyone be sure, when the Tory programme lacks all coherence. Take, for instance, the party's commitment to protect the rising budgets for health and international development, while looking for spending cuts elsewhere, as highlighted by the Shadow Chancellor George Osborne at the weekend. It is utterly baffling.

We can deal with international development very swiftly: it is a relatively small budget, £5.5 billion this year, though rising, and its protection by Mr Cameron is supposed to symbolise the party's continuing “compassion” for the world's poor. At least that is how one of his closest aides put it to me. Hardly a coherent move for the “new government of thrift” that Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne promised last weekend.

The incoherence doesn't stop there. Protecting the health budget over others such as education or Sure Start children's centres is a far more expensive pledge, and is neither “compassionate” nor rational. The NHS budget has ballooned under Labour, doubling in real terms since 1999. It will hit £102 billion in 2010-11, excluding capital costs. Why prioritise that over education? Spending on education has also increased under Labour, by a dramatic 50 per cent, but that is far less than health. Yet if you want to address the “broken society” that Mr Cameron is concerned about, investment in early years and education is a far more pressing need - and a great missed opportunity by Tony Blair.

I have gleaned three answers to the question of why Mr Cameron has chosen to protect health spending. The first, the official one, is that an ageing population and the increasing cost of Alzheimer's drugs and the social care system makes increased health spending inevitable. But then the more coherent Tory approach would be to address some of the problems of funding social care by proposing a form of insurance system, something even Labour has considered, although it has repeatedly shied away from doing it.

The second answer is that the move is political; politicians who do not support the NHS do not win elections. The third answer came from a friend of the Camerons. “It's because of Ivan,” he said, referring to the Camerons' very sick child who was in and out of hospital for six years and died recently.

I understand the instinct. But it is wrong. Many NHS staff do a wonderful job but they have no claim to higher protection than, say, teachers. Doctors are highly paid and comparatively underworked; much of the NHS is a haven of calm compared with the average British secondary school. Doctors face nothing like the daily barrage of demands that a teacher faces.

I have spent days in busy hospitals and days in busy schools; teachers are the ones run off their feet. I was shocked recently to discover that a fine teacher who had just survived a grinding day of disruptive teenagers, a barrage of rudeness, even some mild violence, was paid just £27,000.

The latest consultant contract increased annual earnings by £17,500 to £119,400. Consultants work nowhere near as hard as teachers. NHS pay rocketed under Labour just as EU rules on working hours also kicked in, meaning that doctors are now working fewer hours, and fewer antisocial hours at night-times and weekends, than they used to. In one A&E department I recently spent the day in, they sat around much of the time with little to do (not today, I am sure, with a nation gripped by swine flu panic).

A review of NHS funding and performance conducted by Gordon Brown's former health analyst Derek Wanless, for the King's Fund health think-tank, has pointed out that pay for hospital and community health services staff, ie, about 90 per cent of the NHS workforce, increased by around 30 per cent between 2002 and 2007 in cash terms at a time when average earnings in the economy as a whole rose by 17 per cent. Another think-tank, Reform, has proposed a 10 per cent cut in the higher salaries of senior doctors and managers, surely a proposal that an Opposition serious about addressing public sector spending would at least consider. But instead, the Tories are going to have to cut education. It is incoherent and wrong.

Want more incoherence? How about looking a little closer at one of the “hard choices” that Mr Cameron made at the weekend in the name of austerity - he questioned whether it was right to pay tax credits to people earning more than £50,000. He didn't actually answer the question, mind you; just asked it. I've got another question: if it isn't right for people earning more than £50,000 to receive tax credits, which are anyway minuscule at that level, why is it right for wealthier pensioners to receive the winter fuel allowance, or for better-off mothers to receive child benefits?

Baffled? I am. Suspicious? Me too. No wonder those dreams have gone away.

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