Mr William Hague ended a successful Conservative Party conference in Bournemouth yesterday by declaring himself "ready to govern for all the people" and challenging the Prime Minister, Mr Blair, to call an immediate general election.
Promising to govern "with the common-sense instincts" of the British people, Mr Hague sought to cast the Conservatives as the party of the countryside and council estates against New Labour's "out of touch, metropolitan elite".
Combining the now traditional assertion of "our right to be a nation" with a defence of the morality of tax cuts, Mr Hague said sprawling tower blocks were "rabbit warrens for crime" and pledged to "bulldoze the worst of them" and "reclaim their streets from the drug dealers and car thieves". He promised to create free schools and endow universities, and "sweep away Labour's dogmatic opposition" to private provision for health. Pledging to "match Labour penny for penny on the NHS", Mr Hague pitched for the "grey vote" - saying the Tories would increase pensions and attacking the government for treating pensioners like "charity cases". The Tories, he said, would cut fuel tax, and restore the married persons' allowance - "because I believe marriage is the bedrock of a stable society" - reform the welfare state, and slash the entire Whitehall establishment.
"We're going to reduce the number of ministers, cut the size of the House of Commons, halve the number of political advisers and cut the whole size of Whitehall so that there aren't so many politicians going around dreaming up expensive meddling schemes to interfere in everybody's lives," he said.
Drawing heavily on his Yorkshire upbringing, Mr Hague presented himself as the champion of "the mainstream" - workers in supermarkets and high-street banks, self-employed builders, teachers and nurses. The children he grew up with in the industrial town of Rotherham might be better off than their parents, he said, but they wanted the same things their parents did.
Swiping again at New Labour's "elitism", Mr Hague declared: "They want security and stability for themselves and their families. They want a better life for their own children. Don't think that because they holiday in Tenerife and not Tuscany that they don't have aspirations for a better life."
Some of the warmest applause came when Mr Hague declared the Tories ready to govern the country - "and by country I mean the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland". But the biggest rapture was reserved for the passage asserting the Conservatives could only deliver "if we still have a country left to govern at all".
The Tories, he declared, would be "the champions of Britain's right to govern itself" and of "a flexible, free-trading, low-tax, lightly regulated, different kind of Europe". To those who abolished their own currencies, he said: "Good luck, we wish them well, but we will keep our pound."