This time last week I was worrying about our willingness to look for liberal ideas outside the party tradition. The mood of the times is liberal - and we should be staking out our territory.

Someone else has been trying to jump our claim (you may have noticed). I quoted Will Hutton on the problem faced by Cameron in his search for ideas:

The intellectuals from whom he might borrow to give his intent some ballast - Amartya Sen or John Rawls - are liberal.

In the Observer today, Cameron himself writes, eager to show that the Tories do have ideas. Indeed he claims that they have "big ideas".

You'll have to wait for that. First read the (pretty bold) claims Cameron makes.

We have set the terms of political debate, placing quality of life at the centre of political discussion, and putting environmentalism at the top of the agenda. On crime, we have combined belief in personal responsibility and effective criminal justice with a reassertion of the importance of tackling the causes of crime, and the imperative of family and community stability in the defence of order. In reclaiming for the party the concept of social justice, we have shone a spotlight on Labour's failure to live up to the hope of 1997. Despite undoubted good intentions, and spending enormous sums on welfare and public services, relative poverty has widened under Labour and the numbers of people in deep, entrenched poverty have grown.

Now this is open to question. Who is against "quality of life", "personal responsibility", and "effective criminal justice" after all? Cameron has made speeches on these topics. But you could be forgiven for thinking that these are a list of the things desired by focus groups.

I would need a lot of convincing that Conservatives as a whole are very sold on these sort of issues. And I am not convinced that Cameron means what he says.

In case you think I am too harsh, have a look at the headline to the piece: We are the party of class mobility.

The traditional tory approach to social mobiltity has been to treat it as a safety valve. A few are to be allowed to escape from the proletariat because otherwise social tensions would rise too high. But conservatism is above all about the preservation of privilege. And the pattern of the "modern" Conservative Party fits this mould precisely.

Yes they will have more female candidates at the next election, and a few more ethnic minority candidates. But don't let's pretend that this is going to open the door to people of a wider social background. You can be female and rich; you can belong to an ethnic minority and be educated at our most exclusive public schools.

The reality is that the Conservative Party is more firmly in the grip of a narrow clique of Old Etonians than it has been since the first half of the 1960s. They are imposing an agenda that the great mass of Conservatives are unhappy with, on shaky intellectual foundations.

Don't take my word for it. Here is the Big Tory Idea:

But the real story is more about the big idea at the heart of the modern Conservative party. That idea is social responsibility, the belief we are all in this together.

Fantastic, Dave. This really is a breakthrough.