As predicted here a month ago, the Tories are now stuck in the trap they managed with consummate strategic brilliance to set for themselves. Having pledged to match the government's projected rises in health and education but said they would keep spending below growth, they laid themselves open to the claim that they would have to cut other areas. They now find to their astonishment that this is precisely what the government is crowing.

In the budget, Gordon Brown effortlessly shot the Tory fox of 'bureaucratic waste' by making equally nonsensical pledges to cut thousands of civil service jobs. Having removed the Tories' own eye-catching non-starter, the government then took delight in accusing them of planning to cut defence and law and order. We now have the delightfully original spectacle of the Tories on the back-foot over apparently abandoning their own blue-rinse core values. Absolutely brilliant strategic thinking on the part of messrs Howard and Letwin, especially as so many of us with far lesser brains could see it coming a mile off.

As the Telegraph reports:

'Gordon Brown's attack on Tory spending plans has left a pall of gloom hanging over Conservative MPs, just when they thought that things were looking up after years of misery. They are beginning to wonder whether Oliver Letwin's strategy of announcing detailed proposals to rein in public expenditure more than a year before the general election has turned into a political liability for Michael Howard.'

Beginning to wonder? Maybe they'll have twigged it by the time Prime Minister Brown hands over the keys of No 10 to Ed Balls MP. Maybe by then they will have realised also that their other brilliant wheeze, the slogan: 'Vote Blair, get Brown' might just not have quite the desired effect in a country which, far from seeing Brown as the redistributive fanatic and Old Labour throwback the Tories paint him as, regards him as a safe pair of hands and even the most successful Labour Chancellor ever. Not only that, if he did take over from Blair there would almost certainly be a John Major effect -- a perception that there was now a new government, which had to be given a whole new set of chances. In other words, far from a Brown permiership being a winning Tory card, it should be their worst nightmare.

What all this political nonsense tells us is that the Tories are still a party without a purpose. They do not have a galvanising and transfiguring passion. That is because, deep down, they don't understand or care about the damage that is being done to the country by a government which is either actively destroying its values, traditions and identity or, at best, displaying indifference to the cultural pressures which are remorselessly undermining them. The Tories remain very firmly the party of the self, preoccupied with personal freedom to make and spend money or got to hell on a variety of handcarts. Iain Duncan Smith was a hopeless politician, but he nevertheless understood that the overwhelming issue was to address the country's galloping social suicide and restore a sense of duty to others. In the face of such social disintegration, to bleat on about tax cuts is grotesque.

What's needed is a fundamental recasting of the relationship between the individual and the state so that the individual takes responsibility for himself, his family and his community (through compulsory social insurance and radical decentralisation) to bring the grasping, self-centred culture of entitlement to an end; to restore meritocracy to education, by making schools accountable to parents, setting the universities free from government and taking the exam system away from politicians and giving it back to the professors; and to signal there is one family relationship only which merits state endorsement and support, and that is marriage.

But instead, what are the Tories proposing to signal their sense of priorities? An anti-homophobic officer posted in every school.