It emerged last night that Tory MPs and senior officials were summoned to Conservative headquarters earlier this week for a confidential briefing with their leader on the party's seven new aims for 2007.
Among them was an instruction for MPs to go b
ack to their constituencies and take part in more social projects, like helping to paint or renovate local parish halls.
Multi-millionaire deputy party chairman Lord Ashcroft – who is understood to have already begun loosening his purse-strings for Tory candidates in some key marginals – also delivered a presentation telling MPs to take heart from his research which found party support was reliably in the 36 to 39 per cent range.
Any poll results outside that range should be considered "rogue" and ignored, he said.
Mr Cameron went on to outline the aims – which were later handed out to MPs on laminated wallet-sized cards, to make sure they did not forget.
Number Two was "to increase our support in the North of England", underneath "to win the 2007 local elections in England and meet our goals in Scotland and Wales".
Other aims were "to practise what we preach", which Mr Cameron explained as not only advocating social responsibility but taking direct participation
in social action programmes, and "to align the party's perceived priorities
with people's priorities".
MPs who attended told the Yorkshire Post that
it was an upbeat, morale-boosting gathering.
But there was some concern that the aims were hardly ambitious: the party cannot fail to "win" this year's local elections in England because it already has the most councillors in England, and the party's "goals" in Scotland and Wales are presumably fairly modest.
Last night, Rotherham's Labour MP and former Minister Denis MacShane poked fun at the
"distinct lack of ambition."
"They're not just a set of vacuous injunctions that sound like cliches plucked from a self-help manual, they illustrate all too clearly the fact that they've made so little progress," he said.
"They still have no policies and are nowhere near the position New Labour was in at this stage before the 1997 election.
"We had a properly worked-out and financed policies, a frontbench working day and night to win power, and had successfully buried the election-losing aspects
of the old Labour
Party."
Former Tory leader William Hague, the Richmond MP and chairman of the party's new Northern Board, insisted last night that they were making progress and that recent organisational changes would "lead the revival of the Conservative Party in the North".
A Party spokesman declined to discuss
the briefing or aims
card.
Comment: Page 12.
