Having been away last weekend, I missed the double sacking of erstwhile Tory party deputy chairman and MP Howard Flight over his unguarded remarks, which were reported as suggesting that the Tories had a secret agenda to cut public spending. The press coverage today indicates that, far from being damped down, the affair is gathering yet more momentum. Not only is Flight threatening to go to court over his arbitrary de-selection by Michael Howard as a Tory parliamentary candidate, not only are his local party members up in arms at the way Howard brutally sidelined them into utter irrelevance, but a second Tory candidate who was similarly deselected over remarks which didn’t toe the party line is now also threatening to go to law.

From all this gathering uproar, not to mention the lip-smacking way in which the government is milking this for all it’s worth, it’s hard to avoid concluding that Howard has scored a monumental own goal. Far from giving the impression he wants to give, that the Tories are transparently trustworthy because they say the same thing in public as in private, sacking Flight has given precisely the opposite impression — that he blurted out a truth that the party is desperate to hide. And de-selecting him as a Tory candidate merely suggests that the party is extremely desperate to hide something that must be very significant indeed.

But in fairness to Howard, this was surely a situation in which he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. Flight’s remarks — or at least, the way they have been ruthlessly spun — have breathed life into the Labour lie that the Tories are planning to ‘cut’ £35 billion in public spending when the truth is that they plan to increase it, although by less than Labour intends. Last week, the media gave the government such a rough ride over this lie that its pre-election propaganda machine came off the rails. Since the Flight furore, however, ministers have been repeating the £35 billion smear with brazen insouciance. Once Flight had handed this huge ammunition to the government, therefore, it is hard to see what Howard could have done to repair the damage.

But the big question begged by all this political name-calling is whether what Flight was reported to have said was actually true. Are the Tories merely pledging to increase public expenditure in order to neutralise Labour’s claim that they would slash public services, while all the time planning to do so? Certainly, there is no shortage of Tory MPs who appear to assume that this is indeed so, and that — as Flight said — the overriding priority is first to get back into power. And there are also those who are spitting tacks that the party has pledged to increase public spending, believing that the Tory mission on earth is to cut spending, slash taxes and shrink the size of the state.

My guess is that Howard, a cautious, prudent lawyer who appears temperamentally averse to the politics of risk or the grand gesture, probably genuinely doesn’t know what he would do once in power — because the public mood is hard to read, wanting both lower taxes and more public services. So he wants to park the whole subject of tax and spend: neutralise it altogether as an election issue. Almost certainly, he personally wants to reform the public services. The death of his own mother-in-law from the hospital superbug provided him with the most telling evidence possible of the systemic failure of the NHS. And one would have to be in a hermetically sealed capsule not to be horrified at the collapse of education standards. But the question he almost certainly feels that he can’t answer — and therefore doesn’t want to address — is whether the public is ready to hear a radical remedy for the dire state of the public services. And because he doesn’t know the answer to this but suspects the public is not ready, and because he’s a man who takes no chances, his strategy is to shut down the issue altogether.

That explains the otherwise astounding statement made by the Tories’ shadow Work and Pensions Secretary David Willetts, in Polly Toynbee’s Guardian column today (in which — hilariously — she is torn between horrified admiration and disbelief at the fact that the Tories would spend even more on childcare than Labour). Willetts, attempting to convince her that this proposed Tory largesse was indeed genuine, told her:

‘Our basic approach is that the government defines the baseline and we accept everything they have done or plan to do, unless we specify to the contrary.’

What a staggering position for the Opposition to take — to accept everything the government has done or plans to do! To which one might well ask — so why vote for the Tory monkey when we can vote for the Labour organ-grinder?

The headway that Howard has made in the past few weeks has occurred solely because he started to carve out a distinctive agenda on subjects such as immigration, abortion or human rights. This not only left the government on the wrong side of the argument, but punctured the conspiracy of silence over issues which alarm people as much as they divide them from a political class which has disenfranchised them by refusing to properly address such issues.

But on the public services, Howard flinches from similar distinctive boldness because the Tories are still stuck in a political time-warp over the welfare state. Believing that the alternative to state control and high taxes is the radical individualism of the market and low taxes, they thus allow themselves to be trapped into a choice between supporting either high state spending and good public services, or low state spending and rotten public services. But this alternative does not stand up to scrutiny for a second. Record state spending has resulted in fact in lousy public services (a route down which they have now committed themselves to travel alongside Labour).

The way out of this particular box is not to take refuge, as the Tories are doing, in the bankrupt and empty formula of ‘cutting waste’. It is to radically reformulate the whole relationship between the individual and the state: to say that politics has to be taken out of the public services and professionals made accountable to the public; that individuals have to be given leverage over public services, to take responsibility for themselves and their families and show social solidarity towards those who genuinely cannot; and that this means social insurance for health and long-term care, independence for the universities and vouchers for education. And so on.

In other words, the Tories’ difficulty this week over Howard Flight derives from a far deeper existential crisis over what Conservatism is. It illustrates the party's chronic absence of vision and courage -- and so at a time when the electorate is desperate for just such a choice, it looks as if it is not going to get it.