WHAT WOULD BE REMARKABLE...:

Mr Cameron and Mitt Romney now have a remarkably similar message: we do not want to protect the wealthy, we want to extend wealth. Whereas, the parties of the Left in the US, Britain and Europe say they want to protect the poor but what they are really doing is extending poverty.

As my great hero, the economist Arthur Laffer, has said: "If you pay people to be poor, you will get more and more poor people." Here are Mr Cameron's words, but they could have come from Mr Romney or his running mate: "The mission for this Government is to build an aspiration nation... to unleash and unlock the promise in all our people. And for us as Conservatives, this is not just an economic mission - it's also a moral one."

We have arrived at the era of Postmodern Conservatism. What will it take to fulfil the promise of what may (or may not) have been the most important, game-changing speech of Mr Cameron's leadership? Political nerve and rigorous argument. This is only a beginning: the Tories have just stepped up to the crease - or in American terms, come out of the dugout. It will be a hard and dirty fight against the assumptions of an overwhelmingly Left-wing intellectual establishment.

But there is a coherent position to be defended here, which is not alien to an earlier incarnation of Cameron Conservatism: economic liberalism - the belief in the liberating power of free-market capitalism - is consistent with social liberalism.

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