Professor Tim Congdon has announced in today's Telegraph that he has had enough of David Cameron and will henceforth transfer his support to UKIP. It is a pretty withering assessment of Cameron's vacuity:

An article in The Spectator was enough for me. "Time for a completely new party" contained several hundred words of flannel ("the need for fundamental change", "the problem is our culture", etc.) and one possibly substantive proposal. This was an "exciting new policy direction", with his "proposal for a national school-leaver programme — involving schools, businesses, community organisations, charities and the Armed Forces — to prepare young people for their adult responsibilities and to create a greater sense of national cohesion".

What sense is to be made of all this? No doubt "schools, businesses etc." do many wonderful things, but it is sadly true that their hands are full. They cannot just drop what they are doing and suddenly commit themselves to one of Mr Cameron's pet initiatives. If Mr Cameron were prime minister, he could — I suppose — give orders to "the Armed Forces" to return from Afghanistan and Iraq, and to help in his new "national school-leaver programme" in order to advance "social cohesion". But I don't think that is what he meant.

Mr Cameron's supporters might tell me that the sort of phrases used in the Spectator article, and reproduced on many subsequent occasions, are part of a rebranding exercise. They might say that the politically correct and socially acceptable phrases are necessary to shift the party's "culture" towards the centre and capture more votes. I might also be reassured that the phrases have no implications for actual policy.

But I think this is unfair and dishonest. Mr Cameron should be taken at his word. When he says he is in favour of "national school-leaver programmes", "social action zones" and suchlike, and when he says that the Tories should become "the champions of social action", he really does mean what he says. Whether his words have any genuine meaning is another topic, but of his sincerity in uttering them there should be no doubt.

It seems that the Tory Party's in-house journal is still at odds with the Blue-Labour Cameroonies after all.