Usually it is the governing party that yearns for the sanctuary of the long summer recess after a hot parliamentary July. But as they squared up yesterday for their last Commons confrontation for three months, it was David Cameron, rather than Gordon Brown, who would have been much happier that MPs leave for their holidays today.

Mr Cameron had flown back through the night from Rwanda. Why he had chosen to go there when the Commons was in its last week, and not during the summer when he could have grabbed the headlines for the right reasons, remains a mystery. At Conservative headquarters there was outright derision that the trip had been planned when the Rwandan parliament, which Mr Cameron addressed, was not officially sitting.

He was accommodated in the chamber of deputies, where about a quarter of the parliamentarians heard him, only to be asked by a Rwandan journalist – unprompted by the British press contingent – why he was in Kigali rather than visiting flood-hit areas in his own country. Predictably, the ridicule continued in the Commons yesterday.

The trip to Rwanda having been planned, Mr Cameron was probably right to go. Had he called it off or delayed it, as some of his closest advisers had suggested, it would have looked like outright panic after the by-election defeats in Ealing Southall and Sedgefield.

But its timing was the latest of a series of tactical disasters by the Tory leader since the heady days of the May local elections, when his party gained about 900 seats. The ovation for Mr Cameron at the backbench 1922 Committee last night was as predictable as it was orchestrated. Conservative MPs do not do disloyalty in public; instead they let the Sunday newspapers know they have written private letters to the 1922 chairman voicing their unhappiness with the way things are going.

It is highly unlikely that the majority of his parliamentary party, let alone the ageing membership of the Conservatives, is enthusiastically signed up to his modernising project. When things are right the doubters stay silent; when things begin to go wrong, watch them brief.

Mr Brown is the reason for the latest crisis to grip the Tory party. A leading strategist admitted with admirable candour to The Times yesterday that after May they had expected that Mr Brown’s arrival would increase the Tory polling lead, rather than wipe it away.

Fairly or unfairly, George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, who has seen Mr Brown at closer quarters than most in the past year, is being blamed by MPs close to Mr Cameron for totally underestimating the prospects of a “Brown bounce”. AsThe Timesreported yesterday, there is irritation in the Cameron camp at the behaviour of David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, whom he beat for the leadership. They want to hear more from Mr Davis when things are going awry.

Apart from mismanaging expectations over the coronation of the Prime Minister, the Conservatives badly mishandled the Ealing Southall contest. Why they so talked up their chances in a seat that looked more like a Lib Dem prospect, and why they chose a completely unsuitable candidate, no one seems to know.

Poor old Grant Shapps has got the blame for describing the hapless Tony Lit as a representative of “David Cameron’s Conservatives”, meaning that Mr Cameron, who then compounded the misjudgment by going there five times, would be tied to the defeat when it came.

The Conservatives are going through the kind of bad patch that has characterised the past two decades. The row over grammar schools set it off and things have got worse. There are doubts about who is in charge. Their campaign director, George Bridges, has quit. Andy Coulson, former Editor of the News of the World, has been brought in to head communications and is still making the transition.

“At the moment you’ve got Osborne and Hilton, but there aren’t many others,” one moderniser said yesterday. “When they were in Opposition, Labour had Blair, Brown, Campbell, Prescott, Mandelson all working round the clock to ensure victory. This is a big test for David Cameron. He has to hold his nerve now or it’s all over.”

Mr Cameron is not under threat. He will not be forcibly removed before the next election. The idea that changing the leader would suddenly help a party that, after all, was well ahead only a few weeks ago is nonsensical.

The reason that Tory MPs will lack a spring in their step as they leave Westminster today is the new man at No 10. Most MPs now believe that Mr Brown wants to call an election next summer, probably on the day of the local elections in May. The Conservatives know that they must stop him. Mr Cameron may have called for an election when Mr Brown became leader, but all opposition leaders do that. Little has been heard of that recently.

Mr Cameron’s next few months must be devoted to putting doubts in Mr Brown’s mind. Starting with the Tory conference he needs to show what a lot of his party once believed but have begun to start questioning: that he is a winner.

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