You can forget Hague - he's just preparing the ground for Portillo

All this stuff about renewal sounds like whistling in the dark, something to do when the alternative is to die

THE CONSERVATIVE Party website declares itself in a characteristically unfortunate way. Against a black background, revealed slowly from the top down, it shows us a lonely wisp or two of thin hair, and then, agonisingly - pixel by pixel - a seemingly endless and empty expanse of shiny forehead. Eventually, after what seems like an eternity, the weeny eyes and teeny features of William Jefferson Hague, Leader of the Conservative Party, emerge from the darkness. So little return from so much time!

It is wonderfully easy to be nasty about the Tories. Their poll figures show no sign of revival, with even their most significant Shadow Cabinet members rating lower levels of recognition than a Durex display in a convent. No one knows who they are or what they stand for, and no one seems to care (indeed, if it weren't party conference season I almost certainly wouldn't have written this article). The decision to purchase or hire a job lot of cheap Swedish armchairs, in order that party bigwigs might commune comfortably with conference delegates, has attracted more interest than has the agenda. Alas, it is 16 years too late for Mrs Thatcher to deliver her "spirit of the Falklands" speech, while wearing a Spice Girls T-shirt and lounging on a pink, padded sofa.

All the stuff too, about renewal and party reform, sounds like whistling in the dark - something to do when the alternative is simply to die. If you follow my example and log in to the Tory homepage, you will come across the "Listening To Britain" section. There is a helpful "What is listening to Britain?" link, immediately followed by "What listening to Britain is not".

The answer to which is: "what we're doing right now". Because the one thing everybody has heard this week is about how the Tory membership ballot has "resolved" the single currency question in such a way as to institutionalise opposition on the part of those Tories still most widely respected by the public. This one will run and run, to smaller and smaller audiences. Nothing has so far been said or done to suggest a challenge to Blairite centre-left hegemony.

For, as we now know, history spoke on 1 May last year - and history tends not to speak twice in the same decade. Broadly, the electorate wanted to reverse the trend towards a sauve qui peut social policy, and substituted for it a party committed to government activism in pursuit of common goals. This trend has a long way to run yet. A very long way.

So what, now, is the Conservative Party for? Does it embrace the current desire for government to try to fix things on behalf of its citizens and merely seek to manage it better? Or does it advocate a contrary, anti- state philosophy and wait until the cycle turns again? Should it become part of a pre-millennial consensus, or turn Gingrichite?

To answer this question, it is worth looking at the thinking both of Mr Hague himself, and also of the man for whom I am increasingly certain he is playing the role of William the Baptist, the eventually-to-be-resurrected Michael Portillo.

In a lecture in July to the Politeia think-tank, Mr Hague attempted to define a new Burkeanism, which set a limit to the role of the state, while encouraging the activity of intermediate institutions. The trouble was that, whenever this formulation seemed to call for a hard choice, Mr Hague ducked it. "The Welfare State," he argued, "has brought great material benefits to many people... but we have paid a heavy price for these benefits... Many of the responsibilities we have to each other are now discharged by the State... To a worrying extent, we have nationalised compassion."

The obvious thing to do is to cut down the Welfare State then, n'est ce pas? Non. For we must "keep that open, equitable financing which has seen the great 20th-century advance in health and education, while at the same time trying to bring back some of our local pride and that rich experimentation and diversity which was such a strength in 19th-century Britain. I want us to create in the 21st century public services that suffer neither from the Fabian uniformity of this century nor the erratic dependence on personal wealth or the charity of others in the 19th century."

Mr Hague is not in a position to attach exact policies to vague generalisations, but he illustrates his views by reference to schools, advocating that heads should enjoy much greater autonomy from all elected control over areas such as admissions policies, class sizes and teacher recruitment. The same goes for the NHS, where GPs will have their fund-holding status restored, and in which small local hospitals should be protected against the encroachment of large, modern, distant ones. This is inevitably, as Mr Hague must know, more and not less expensive. His peroration, nevertheless, is superficially appealing. "Our agenda will champion a Britain that New Labour don't really understand. A country that is a great tapestry of local traditions and civic pride and small societies. A country that is proud of its idiosyncrasies and its eccentrics. A country that values freedom, that values liberty and is suspicious of those who want to deny it." The politician who could make this sound as though it meant something, might be on to a winner.

Enter Mr Portillo. His jottings on the "way forward", published in this newspaper last week, conform in many ways to the sentiments expressed by William Hague. But there is an added steeliness to them that suggests an ideology, and not a wish-list. For a kick-off, we should reduce taxation "to US or Japanese levels". Rather sweetly, Portillo suggests that "this will require substantial reform of the public sector". Too true! It would mean a wholesale shift towards personal provision for education, welfare and health services.

And even the services provided by this smaller state would be subject to "true" devolution. This would mean more leeway for individual schools, overt rationing in health care by local communities (though the method of divining choice is unclear), and - even - devolved responsibility to local communities about how to spend the welfare budget. Though, once more, the agency empowered with making such a choice is not defined.

This really is the Full Gingrichite Monty. Essentially it involves removing state protection for the weak and the poor, stops the redistribution of resources from rich individuals to poor communities, and hands out power to a series of highly local - often voluntary - agencies. So the local hospital in Solihull will be fantastic, the selective school in Bromsgrove will be superbly endowed, the elderly of Barnet will have their hedges trimmed twice a week. And the gates of these new city states will be patrolled 24 hours a day by men in smart uniforms, lest the ragged and the criminal seek entry.

For an insight into this mentality you need look no further than yesterday's Daily Telegraph editorial on the recent elections in Australia. In it, the paper referred to a protest vote "made by ordinary Australians, who have legitimate worries about immigration". My God, how the Aborigines must have laughed at that one! And how expressive it is of the coming new politics of the right. We are to suffer rule by the Golf Club, composed - in equal parts - of complacency and paranoia. That, I fear, is the crock at the end of the forehead.