If the nation doesn't hate Labour as much as it ought to, whose fault is that?

The right seems to be blaming the 'Biased Broadcasting Corporation'. Andrew Marr. Greg Dyke. Set the beagles on 'em

A guy I know, American, lives in London, can tell you the population of Vanuatu or the Prime Minister of Nordrhine-Westphalia, but ask him to name a single member of the Shadow Cabinet, and he comes over all Dubya. Health spokesman? No idea. Shadow Chancellor? Wouldn't that be Norman, no, Brian, er, nope, it's gone. Sorry. Party chairman? Haven't a clue. He knows who Iain Duncan Smith is, and in his opinion that's enough, if not too much.

It is customary at this point to bemoan the consequences of a weak opposition and to proclaim, rather piously, that it is important for democracy not just that the main non-government party be coherent, but that it should be positively tumescent. This feeling led to Charles Kennedy receiving plaudits for his "questioning" stance during the special parliamentary session on Iraq and to IDS being hammered for lining up with the Government.

The Iraq example was, indeed, a pretty good indicator of the problems facing the Conservative Party. The political space for opposition to the Government was simply not space that the Tories could occupy, having already committed themselves to a position of criticising the Government for occasionally not being hawkish enough. This might have seemed a promising area for exploitation following 11 September, but today there are virtually no takers among the electorate for the argument that the PM is insufficiently bellicose.

As with Iraq, so with almost everything else. The space that Tony has left is, on the whole, the kind of space that you don't want to live in if you're a politician who'd quite like – one day – to be in power. I offer you, for example, IDS at the great Countryside march. If Parliament votes for a ban on fox-hunting, does the Conservative leader really want to enter the next election on the pledge to bring it back?

And what else will IDS offer the countryside? The abolition of the right to roam? Higher subsidies to farmers? Greater protectionism against foreign imports? That every member of his family will pledge to open a post office in a hamlet nowhere near you? These are not vote-winners in the country at large. Yet you have to say something 'cos marches is one thing and policies is another. Which is why any anti-strategy based mainly on the Government simply being despised enough to be toppled is almost certainly doomed.

Yet if you read the conservative press, and those thinkers and writers who might support the Tory party, you cannot help but be struck by the compete absence – after five years – of any coherent critique of New Labour, let alone of any substantial formulation of alternative policy. Instead the right seems to be settling once again into one of its periods of blaming the BBC for not fully informing the electorate how good the Tories are and how bad Labour is. If the nation doesn't hate Blair as much as it ought to, then whose fault is that? Who, after all, has been responsible for all this embarrassing stuff about sex between Conservatives? The Biased Broadcasting Corporation. Andrew Marr. Greg Dyke. Set the beagles on 'em.

In Labour's first term I thought that there was room for a revamped libertarian Tory party, one that would combine an emphasis on personal freedom with one of economic freedom. Led by Michael Portillo, this would have been the "Gays and Vouchers" party, liberalising drug laws, welcoming immigrants, reducing taxes and reshaping public services. Instead we got a party of aged Mail-reading nostalgists, who came out into the light of the 2001 election blinking and moaning like a coachload of Chelsea pensioners put down by mistake on PVC night at Madame JoJo's.

Now I wonder whether that space is still available. In yesterday's Daily Telegraph the leading article continued the paper's theme of defending personal freedom. Under Labour, the writer argued, there is "too much regulation, too many targets, too much central control, too much politicisation and too little delivery". You don't need to be a genius to spot the tension there between the first four complaints and the fifth. Regulation, targets, central control and politicisation are, of course, the consequences of a government feeling over-obliged to deliver. Which is why many of the targets and controls were introduced by Margaret Thatcher.

Even so, the Telegraph has a point, and one that the Government now recognises. That is why it is busy handing out dosh directly to headteachers (a Tory innovation), is contemplating foundation hospitals and has brought the language of anti-centralisation – albeit unconvincingly – into its own speech-making.

Meanwhile, honest Tories have begun to name the regulations that overburden industry and that – they claim – are affecting our productivity. The MP Boris Johnson this week gave three examples, including "new laws on paternity leave, unfair dismissal and rights for part-time workers, all of which make it more difficult to hire and fire."

It is hard, offhand, to think of any ground on which Labour would rather fight than this. Can we really – if we are pro-family – not afford to give new dads the right to a few days off when their kids are born? The party political broadcast writes itself.

I'm not being very helpful. This is because the Tories missed one big chance when Hague refused to take the hard path and confront his party, Kinnock-style, after the 1997 defeat. And they missed the second when they gave the risky Portillo the elbow last year. Now they are beginning to talk about another leadership challenge (they, at least, are not fooled by the narrowing of the Labour opinion poll lead to 5 per cent). And the result is that, in that lost time, Labour has tacked to cover the ground where it was becoming weak.

No wonder that the best friendly analysis of the Tory predicament that I have seen this year comes from the American based commentator, Andrew Sullivan. In Prospect magazine, Sullivan argues that there is scope for a strategy that brings together the various parts of a powerful potential Tory alliance. The issue, he says, is democracy, where there is an increasing deficit as sources of power are pushed very obviously away from the citizen. The "stage villains", says Sullivan, are the "political élites who seek to escape democratic constraints" by handing power to supra-national bodies and judges. A promise to repatriate power would satisfy nationalists, economic libertarians and moral traditionalists – who, for example, have a "distaste for the UN's moral agendas".

Oh dear, and he was doing so well. In America that last one is code for "abortion". And right now there is not an overwhelming admiration for American-style unilateralism, which is what Sullivan's position amounts to. Which takes us back to IDS at the Iraq debate, watching Charles Kennedy playing to the gallery by invoking the United Nations.

Some problems, the knowledgeable American says (and this he does know), have no solutions.

David.Aaronovitch@btinternet.com