So you guys are finally starting to get it. You might find that an impertinent compliment coming from an administration whose approval ratings are stuck at 40%, but back when I first went into politics in the 1970s the British Conservative party was the most successful centre-right party in the world and the Republicans hadn’t controlled Congress for a generation.

Now we control the White House, both Houses of Congress and the majority of state legislatures. Compare that with your good selves. In the last election you were running against a prime minister who had taken his country into an unpopular war — and you barely managed to scrape a third of the vote.

In Blackpool, everybody I met expected you would lose again, even though you will be running against a dour Scot who can’t stand middle England and has raised taxes 100 times.

What should you do? Well, the first thing is: don’t panic. Start looking at America. We might have a more conservative electorate than you do, but we’re also more successful because we know what we stand for. You don’t. There are things that you can learn from us. Call them the seven habits of highly successful conservatives.

1) Plan for the long term. Your best chance of winning the next election is, paradoxically, to look as if you are running for the one afterwards. Come up with a set of ideas and stick with them.

The most striking thing about American conservatives is our relentlessness. We have established a handful of policy goals — cut taxes, restore American power, revitalise traditional values — and stuck to them through thick and thin.

2) Invest in ideas. Ideas are the only thing in politics that endure and I didn’t hear nearly enough of them in Blackpool. Investing in ideas does not mean giving more cash to the Conservative Research Department or piling even more onto David Willetts’s plate. Borrow some lessons from business and outsource. Over the past quarter-century we have built up a rive droite of think tanks; during the 1990s alone we invested some $1 billion in them.

The ideas have come gushing: welfare reform, broken-windows policing, neoconservative ideas about pre-emption and democratising the Middle East. You have only a handful of tiny think tanks, all strapped for cash. We have more conservative brainpower in one building in Washington DC than you have in the whole of the country.

3) Use those ideas to create some clear blue water between yourselves and the lefties. To be a credible right-wing party you need to outdo the opposition on national security, taxes and crime. Your position on taxes is particularly crazy. In the last election you promised to devote 0.1% less than Labour to government spending. This time round Ken Clarke boasted about restricting government spending to 40% of GDP.

Forget about the focus groups which tell you that tax cuts are not popular. In three years’ time, as Gordon Brown’s tax rises bite, the middle class will be hollering for some tax relief — and the National Health Service will be sure to fritter away all that new money on boondoggles for bureaucrats.

Use those ideas to change the direction of public debate. Look at the publicity that George Osborne got for talking about the flat tax. Go on the offensive with examples of government waste. It’s not difficult to find. Point out that government intervention can produce perverse consequences.

Don’t accept the absurd BBC-ish assumption that business pursues private greed while government pursues the public good. Besides, as you discovered last time, nobody really believes you when you say that you won’t cut taxes.