Bernard Ingham: As the shambles goes on, Cameron's hour draws near

After bottling it at least three times, David Miliband should certainly be invested with the Order of the White Feather – assuming his colleagues have left any to pin on his manly chest.

The real significance of all this is that the modern Labour Party has amply demonstrated its utter bankruptcy. It has a deluded Prime Minister, a cowering, calculating Cabinet for whom the national interest is an irrelevance and a Parliamentary party that is running scared and afraid to strike.

It has also revealed that it does not have within its ranks a single politician of national stature worthy of leading the country. The nearest approach – Lord Mandelson – tells you everything you need to know about its shameful poverty. Would you entrust your nation to that man?

David Cameron's hour is nigh. Another five months of Labour

incompetence can only seal the return of a Tory Government, even if the Conservative leader does "mess up" from time to time as, for example, over tax incentives for married couples.

All this leaves me pondering on the parallels between 1979 and 2010. Thirty years ago, the British people wondered whether their country was still governable. Now they worry whether any one person can possibly cope with the manifold problems of a broken Britain.

In 1979, they did not warm to Margaret Thatcher. They thought she could conceivably make things worse but she was all they had. Her majority of 43, serviceable but hardly a ringing endorsement, reflected their concerns.

Cameron has not enthused the nation. Brown plays upon concerns about his substance. But he is all we have got and millions of people are praying that, like Thatcher, he can rise to the occasion. He needs to do so.

In many ways, his task is greater than hers. The Britain of 1979 may have been stuck in a 35-year-old pale pink socialist rut and defeatist in the face of the union onslaught, but it still mostly worked when it was not being sabotaged by militants.

Now, it is simply not delivering in spite of the billions lavished on public services by a Prime Minister who has devoted 12 years to bribing the people with their own taxes. He has built a client state that serves its clients ill. In the process, we have discovered the wages of spin: disrepute and decay. This is a corrupted country – and not merely by Iraq.

Of course, the next Government's priority must be to slash the unprecedented budget deficit and restore the nation's finances. That is vital. But no government can hope to succeed unless it also restores the integrity of the body politic and ends the manifold abuses of the taxpayer. By 2015, this must not merely be a solvent nation but also a more moral one.

Almost on cue, the release under the 30-year rule of the first of the Thatcher Government's papers, with her fierce marginal notes, have arrived to offer Cameron some guidance on how to conduct himself.

I am not saying he should acquire a handbag or a felt-tip pen with which to flay his colleagues' papers for not being tough enough. Attila the Hen was never endowed with tact and there is no need for Cameron to run an unnecessarily wearing government.

But, as custodian of its ethos and direction, he will need above all to display three qualities that the Thatcher papers identify in her.

First, make your mark early. Show that Britain is under different management and will not be allowed to slip back into the old,

profligate and indulgent ways. If, as Tory posters say, we cannot go on like this, they must be seen to change the atmosphere overnight.

Second, prove you have an iron will. Modern government is primarily a test of will. Without it, there is no hope.

Third – and this was Thatcher's greatest quality – do not aspire to be loved. Forget about being nice. As in 1979, what Britain demands is competence, effectiveness and integrity, especially in view of the depths to which we have sunk over the past decade.

Cameron need not fear the judgment of history if he is consistently tough, fair and straight and leaves the nation in better condition than he found it. We don't expect the earth but we do want something better than the present shambles.