Leave it, Dave, they're not worth it!

This week, we're told, Conservative leader David Cameron is going to have a moderately crappy time of it at his party conference thanks to a membership who think he's not sufficiently gung-ho about good old fashioned Tory ideals. The Guardian's Max Hastings writes that "Cameron is about to discover his big problem: the Conservative party"; a survey in the Independent finds that "Tories are at odds with Cameron's agenda".

And, right on cue, the scariest of the vultures are indeed beginning to circle. Janet Daley grumbles in the Telegraph that "It's not 'Right-wing' to believe in tax cuts: it's just good sense", which sounds unpleasantly like the kind of slogan that lost the party the 2005 election. The Mail's Melanie Phillips, meanwhile, is growling that "There are distinct limits to presenting politics as the new aromatherapy" (I'm unfortunately without a link to that one, but really don't think it's worth buying a copy of the Mail just to read a columnist as horribly bilious as Phillips). It seems that everyone and their dog thinks the bright young thing is at serious risk of getting his backside well and truly clobbered.

No matter how I look at it, though, I think that's misreading it. I think he wants a fight. After all, in 1985 Labour's Neil Kinnock took on the militant tendency; ten years later, Tony Blair played a similar game by abandoning "clause four", the part of the party's constitution that committed it to spreading public ownership of industry and commerce as far as the eye can see.

Leaders of opposition parties with image problems need that symbolic battle. It isn't enough in itself - Kinnock still failed spectacularly to win two elections after his battle, after all - but it goes a long way towards showing that the leader is on the side of the electorate, and not that of their own party's extremists. The fact that so many commentators are convinced that the party faithful will once again drag it back to the right merely shows that Cameron still needs this battle.

That, I suspect, is why he keeps going on about how economic stability matters more than tax cuts, even though the party has admitted that it wants to use some of the proceeds of growth to cut taxes. It's probably also why shadow chancellor George Osborne is muttering darkly that taxes might even have to rise, which is just about the stupid thing any conservative anywhere could ever say to their supporters. They're actually trying to provoke the right. If they don't, how are the electorate to see that the party has really moved away from the right-wing ground from where it has lost the last three elections?

I don't think he's worried. Actually, I suspect he can't wait.