星空传媒

The old bit of the new outfit was, well, the party itself. A health professional working for a pharmaceutical company claims he spent the week on the company鈥檚 stand in Brighton acting as a one-man surgery. The Tories did not want to know about the future of the NHS drugs budget, they wanted to know what to do about their hips and their haemorrhoids.

A party membership of advancing years is one factor beyond the magic touch of the makeover merchants. They can spend a fortune on a futuristic platform with the now mandatory right-on slogan. They can arrange for their leader to be surrounded by young people outside the conference. If they are lucky he may even get kissed by one of them. This should preferably be a girl, but hey, these days a boy could be okay. They can arrange all this, but what they cannot do is go round the conference hall with bottles of Grecian 2000 and tubes of anti-ageing cream.

The other elderly contribution was a rather surprising echo from the past. The Tories have once again embraced Lady Thatcher鈥檚 legacy. They have spotted the convenient fact that while she always won elections, 鈥淏鈥�, and that young lad William Hague, lost them.

Better still, some of her policies can be dusted down and repackaged. There is hope in Conservative ranks that they could be as popular now as they were then. Notable among these is the revival of the right to buy.

This time, of course, it comes with a compassionate twist: revenue from the Great Housing Association Sale will be ploughed back into building more social housing.

There was also plenty that was new. Twenty-five policies, for a start, and some of them didn鈥檛 sound like Conservative proposals at all. One hardly expects to hear a Tory shadow home secretary promising a massive expansion of drug rehabilitation centres as his big idea for tackling youth crime. Has Oliver Letwin gone soft?

A party membership of advancing years is beyond the magic of makeover merchants: they can鈥檛 go round with bottles of Grecian 2000 and tubes of anti-ageing cream

Well, yes he has. At least when it comes to asylum seekers, he admits to being softer than David Blunkett. No wonder he was apprehensive before delivering his thoughts to the party faithful. But these days it is the Nice Party so it was alright 鈥� there would be no more verbal flogging of single parents, no more talk of scroungers and getting on your bike. Mr Nasty had been sent away, although some claimed to have spotted him cycling round the conference fringes. Lord Tebbitt remains as defiant as ever.

No serious policy launch these days would be complete without something borrowed 鈥� and the Tories have been borrowing with a vengeance. In the trade, they call it policy tourism. New Labour spent many years in opposition dashing across the Atlantic picking up ideas from academics, policy makers and government. The Conservatives have spent the last year chalking up the air miles in similar fashion, so expect to hear even more about Swedish hospitals, German schools and Italian administration (I made that last one up, but you never know 鈥�).

All of this came in a bright blue wrapping; not a disparate collection of stocking fillers, but a series of ideas that did have some coherence. The Tory bride was able to say what she intended to bring to this union

less government, less central control, more choice, fewer state-run services, greater use of private and voluntary agencies and more encouragement for people to do their own thing when they can afford to do.

The difficult bit lies ahead. The devil of all policy-making lies in the detail and, as the Conservatives freely admit, the 25 new ideas are little more than outlines of intent.

The chances of the new-look Tory bride being accepted anytime soon remain slim.