The Tory full-scale retreat from their blood-curdling threat to cut and cut again, straightaway and savagely, because Britain’s revival depended on it, is degenerating into farce. This is not just a tweaking of the tempo or scale of their proposed cuts, it is a wholesale withdrawal from what they themselves previously insisted was the essential core of their policy to save Britain from a spiralling deficit that would prompt a bond strike in the financial markets and precipitate a downgrading of the country’s triple A credit status. So what has changed? The recovery in the real economy is still very fragile, but then it was before too.
What has changed is the politics reflecting greater caution about the basis of the recovery, plus a gradual but steady narrowing of the Tory poll lead. So Cameron is covering his tracks with some neat re-positioning, but only at a substantial price. It does not inspire confidence to build economic policy on the shifting sands of political sentiment. It risks an explosion from the Tory Right. And it leaves the wreckage of Tory economic policy floating aimlessly rather close to Labour’s position, suggesting that if the key dividing line between the parties is thus kicked away, there’s little incentive or rationale to change governments.

Nor is this the first time that the Tories have been making sudden and drastic changes in policy in the last few months. Cameron told us he would give a tax break to encourage marriage, then he played it down, and then he backed off again (no doubt assisted by expostulations from the Daily Mail). He wooed the environmental vote by saying ‘Vote blue, go green’, then we found that two-thirds of planning applications to build wind turbines are rejected by Tory Councils. He hugs a hoodie, then tells us he’s so determined to send people down that he’ll even build a floating jail. H says that non-doms should be made to pay their whack, but then is forced to admit that Zac Goldsmith, one of his parliamentary candidates, is a non-dom. He wants clarity over tax matters, but is hugely coy about the tax status of Lord Ashcroft who is largely bank-rolling the Tory Party. He is secretly trying to fix a merger with the Northern Ireland unionist parties, but is unconcerned that that would rule himself out as independent peace broker between the unionists and the nationalists.
Being all things to all people does get you into knots. But when you’re bidding to head up the next government of this country, it does encourage caution about whether you can be really trusted to be open and honest, and perhaps even worse, whether you really know yourself what you stand for.

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