The Tories' Failed 2008

This should have been the year of the Tories. When they finally threw of the shackles of unpopularity that has so damned them since circa 1992, and became the likely party to form the next government. Cameron should be the indisputable Prime Minister in waiting, and the Tories should be acting with the confidence we last saw from the Labour Opposition from 1995 onwards.

And for a lot of the year, it looked as if this might happen. For the first part of the year, the polls showed Brown was about as popular as Mr Bean - if Mr Bean was a sex offender. And Labour behaved just as you might expect from a bloated, rudderless party sailing towards the rocky shores of electoral oblivion. They turned on each other like a pack of cannibals who have been fasting for a while but have just remembered how great eating each other can be.

On the flipside, Cameron stayed popular in the polls, and grudgingly liked by the people. Even his sickening holiday snaps were lapped up by the press - if only because they were less ghastly than those from Brown. But it was then - around about the time of everyone's summer holidays, that it all started to fall apart for the Tories again.

The sudden return to infighting did not help. The Shadow Chancellor did not need the Labour party to call for his resignation - there seemed to be enough people in his own party who were willing to do that. And when you think that his crime was just simply holidaying aboard a yacht and not taking a dubious donation... Lord, the Tory rank and file need to realise that socialising with the stupidly rich is not going to be the exception for this Tory leadership team, but rather the norm.

However, the real problem the Tories have at the moment is they are fundamentally failing to act as the opposition. And they are failing to do anything. Sure, their scope for action is limited, but at the moment the population as a whole is seeing Gordon Brown doing *something*, whilst the Tories occasionally mumble disapprovingly in their general direction. The Tories should be angry. They should be strident. They should proactively be offering an alternative to the Nu Labour spending spree currently happening in this country. They need to, you know, oppose - as opposed to meekly sitting and watch Gordon Brown and his team of evil flying monkeys drag this country further into the shit.

The Tories need to be showing they have teeth. They need to be talking about tax cuts, they need to be talking about spending cuts - not tax cuts at some point in the future if they are properly costed and not talking about cuts in the growth of government. This is not the time to be a consensus politician. Blair got away with in in 1997 because the economy was doing ok. Now, it really isn't. And the party who offers an alternative to the (largely shitty) status quo will be the one who wins the next election - even if their ideas are (like Labour's) free form bollocks. And that is what we are seeing right not.

I'm not excited by the prospect of a Tory victory right now, but I'm pretty depressed at the idea of another five years of Gordon Brown's "policies". But the Tories have many fervent supporters throughout the country, and they want their party to be in power after the votes have been counted after the next election. And the Tory slide in the polls shows there is only one way this is going to happen. If the Tories start fighting. If they start being the opposition.

Cameron's Conservatives appear to be so terrified of being perceived as the nasty party that they don't want to take the fight to Brown. This is, of course, nonsense. They need to be careful of being perceived as the nasty party towards the British public - but at this point, there is everything to be lost and nothing to be gained by the Tories continuing to mutely accept what the government is doing. As crude as it sounds, they need to be chanting at Brown "you're shit, and you know you." In fact, literally doing that in the House of Commons would be a step forward for the Tories. They'd be more like Her Majesty's Opposition. Rather than looking like a gaggle of disapproving, worried youths.