THERE WAS once a time when Conservatives wanted “clear blue water” between themselves and the Labour Party. Now it looks as though blue water — at least in the form of the shopping centre of that name — is losing its attraction. It was Bluewater that banned young people from wearing hoodies because their clothing could shield their faces from CCTV cameras while they were committing crimes.

Tony Blair endorsed the ban, but today it will be questioned by the Tory leader in a speech to the Centre for Social Justice. He will say that the hoodie is more of a “defensive” item than it appears and that society should concentrate harder on the emotional causes of antisocial behaviour. More “love”, he will say, is demanded.

You have to admit that this is a dramatic piece of repositioning. In one speech the Tories will have gone from flog-em to snog-em. This deft reinterpretation of the hoodie could be extended to other fashion statements that have been unfairly linked to law-breaking. Mr Cameron might conclude, for instance, that men who rush into banks branding shotguns, with tights on their heads, are not the hoodlums that we have always suspected but repressed transvestites seeking a suitably public location to demonstrate their sexual frustrations.

So why is Mr Cameron trying to shift the public’s perception of his party from that of Atilla the Hun to Barney the Dinosaur? Conventional wisdom suggests three possible explanations.

The first — especially when taken with his recent interview by Jonathan Ross — is that this is a brilliant pre-emptive strike aimed at capturing the youth vote. Hoodies might be aged 14 to 15 today, but how old will they be come a general election in 2009 or 2010? Exactly.

The second explanation is that this is really an astute pitch to the angst- ridden middle classes who believe that if only we were kinder to teenage boys they would all turn out like Harry Potter.

The third is that this is one more step down the road to Mr Cameron’s version of Pol Pot’s Year Zero, in which anything ever expressed by a previous Conservative leader has to be repudiated. In which case, under the Khmer Bleu we can look forward to further innovations, such as “let the Argies have the Falklands”, or “maybe those trade union leaders in the 1970s had a point, after all”.

None of these theories cuts the mustard. For a start, almost no one aged 18 or 19 goes to a polling station these days and if they did chance upon a ballot box they would probably stick it on their head as a more effective disguise than a hoodie. Sections of the metropolitan middle class may start off liberal on crime, but after the first mugging/robbery/burglary they tend to demand castration for those responsible.

No, it seems to me that there is a more logical and, indeed, sincere explanation for Mr Cameron’s call for society to hug a hoodie. The more you think about it, the more there is in common between the Conservative leader and his entourage and the hoodies.

The quotes released in advance of Mr Cameron’s speech illustrate this perfectly. He will begin by insisting: “The hoodie is a response to a problem, not a problem in itself.” The same could be noted of the Notting Hill Set, who are a response to a problem of three successive electoral defeats at the hands of new Labour.

He will observe that: “We — the people in suits — often see hoodies as aggressive, the uniform of a rebel army of young gangsters.” Recast that sentence by substituting the words “they” for “we”, and “Tories without ties” for “hoodies” and you have precisely the aggrieved sentiments that thousands of traditional Conservatives have come to harbour towards his leadership.

The metaphor extends to policy. Mr Cameron sympathises with those who put on hoodies because “in a dangerous environment, the best thing to do is keep your head down, blend in, don’t stand out”. It can hardly be said that the instincts of William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith or Michael Howard were to “blend in, don't stand out” — and look where it got them. Mr Cameron, by contrast, is determined that all the political parties should, like hoodies, be indistinguishable.

Mr Cameron wants his colleagues, like the hoodies, to be “inside the boundaries” where “we have to show a lot more love”. Finally, when he asks for attitudes to hoodies to be based on “emotional development instead of . . . exam results” all we need to do is substitute the word policy for exam and there is the essence of Mr Cameron’s appeal to the electorate.

So there it is, “hug a hoodie” is code for “hug a modern, compassionate Conservative”. Like the hoodies, Tories have had a pretty bad press over the past decade, when all they are are normal if slightly alienated souls who prefer to hang around with their mates, never intend to disturb the rest of us, yet find it extremely difficult to open up to outsiders (that is, two thirds of voters). So Mr Cameron’s call for these much maligned characters to be seen in a new light is not a surreal and incredible publicity stunt but an honest act of personal empathy.

Will it work? Well it might, and “clear blue water” never delivered anything of worth (except seats to Labour). The whole of Mr Cameron’s tenure and type of Toryism can, from here on in, be subjected to the “hoodie test”. Are he and his team basically nice lads, who want to fit in, perfectly harmless if you were to let them near your valuables? Or was the manager of the Bluewater Shopping Centre right to regard them as cunning rascals?

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