THE Tories have opened up a 16-point lead over Labour, their biggest in more than 20 years, a poll for this weekend’s Sunday Times has found.

YouGov put the Conservatives on 43%, compared with 27% for Labour and just 16% for Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats. Gordon Brown has now taken Labour to its lowest poll rating since 1983, when Michael Foot was the party’s leader.

If the results were repeated at a general election, Cameron would lead his party to a Commons majority of around 120.

The poll also shows Alistair Darling’s budget has failed to go down well with voters — the Tories significantly are ahead on economic competence.

The findings follow an upbeat speech on family policy by Cameron today in which he told an audience of Tories “We’ve made people feel good about our party again”.

But he warned against complacency and told his followers that they should beware sticking too rigidly to the traditional Tory emphasis on the two-parent family, arguing it “doesn’t reflect the realities.”

Cameron, speaking to the Conservative Spring Forum in Gateshead, said family policies should give support to single parents as much as to traditional couples.

“The modern Conservative Party is the party of families, and we need to support them all”, he said.

Cameron added: “There are single parents, divorced parents, widows – all working hard to keep their families together, to keep their children on track,” he told the gathering.

Cameron also used his speech to acknowledge the level of suspicion of politicians, saying the public believe they “lie and spin”. He said MPs should lose their “cushy” final-salary pension scheme as well as the right to set their own pay.

The majority off Cameron’s speech, however, was designed to set out his family policies. He accepted it was best for children to be brought up in a two-parent family, but this should not be the party’s only priority.

He warned traditionalists that the party had to be in tune with contemporary society. “Let’s be honest with ourselves — there have been some on the right who have got families wrong too, suggesting that the only thing that matters is family structure, and the only thing parents need government to do is get out of the way,” he said. “Well I’m sorry, that simply doesn’t reflect the realities of bringing up a child.”

Cameron’s speech represented a shift from his position a year ago, when he blamed much of the increase in gun crime on the breakdown of traditional household structures and promised more support for two–parent families.

Cameron proposed today to support families by protecting children from “ruthless marketers and shameless retailers” who irresponsibily targeted children as alcohol consumers, and from sex and violence in the media.

He said parents had been right to protest at the positioning of chocolate by checkouts in shops and to demand that Woolworths withdraw a child’s bed with the provocative name Lolita. He said there should be higher taxes on alcoholic drinks popular with teenagers, and that liquor licences should be cancelled for problem premises.

Cameron said he would increase the number of health visitors by 4,200, with a £200m “universal health visiting service” funded by scrapping plans for more outreach workers for SureStart family centres.

This would make it possible for every mother to receive 29 hours of visits before their child’s first birthday, he suggested. SureStart was a good scheme, but health visitors would reach more families than the outreach workers.

He accused ministers of allowing the number of health visitors — who see patients and new mothers at home — to go into “freefall” over the last three years, with numbers dropping by 10% to just 9,000 full-time posts.

The Conservative leader also told his members that it was time to clean up “our broken politics”, and their party had been part of the problem.

It was his first conference speech since the Derek Conway affair, which has prompted fresh scrutiny of MPs’ spending on family members and expenses.

“Let’s be clear what they [members of the public] think of us: ‘You lie and you spin, you fiddle your expenses and you break your promises’. This isn’t a ‘mood’. It cuts deep. And we have to respond,” he said.

“Let’s not pretend that we’re outsiders to Westminster, come to clean things up. We’ve been part of the problem and we need to sort it out from within.”

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