Tory leader Michael Howard. Photograph: Dan Chung
It's pissing down again this morning in Bournemouth, and things are no sunnier inside the conference hall. Today's Times/Populus poll shows the Conservatives lagging seven percentage points behind Labour. Tory delegates clutching the paper look more downcast than the weather.
So what do the Tories do? Dangle mouth-watering tax cuts in front of the electorate? No. Brace themselves and promise to push back the frontiers of the state? Not really. Rally the nation against the threat of a European super-state? Definitely not.
Instead the party is unveiling a modest timetable for action - specific commitments for its first day, first week and first month in office. Meanwhile, the shadow chancellor, Oliver Letwin, is merely spelling out what taxes he's minded to cut. There'll be no figures, no promises, no tax cuts to look forward to.
It is hardly inspiring stuff. It is, however, sensible politics. Tory policy supremo David Cameron explains the reasoning behind it in today's Guardian - that after seven years of big Labour promises people won't believe anything to too extravagant.
This view is informed by the party's focus groups - Bruce Anderson, in the Spectator, is good on what they've been saying. No one, it seems, believes the Tories will cut taxes. The Times poll finds something similar: only 37% of voters, and 33% of swing voters, believe they would tax less.
So today's announcements are a sensible response to the public's mood of cynicism and mistrust, a reasonable reaction to the party's flat-lining poll rating. What they don't seem to address however is why the party's, and Michael Howard's, popularity is plummeting. The Tory leader is now less popular that his predecessor, Iain Duncan Smith, god help him.
The only answer seemingly offered by the party to that problem is to present its leaders as more human, more rounded, more like you and me. Indeed it unveiled a wacky video to that end yesterday - revealing the lucky recipient of Nicholas Soames' first kiss. Let's just hope that Mr Letwin and John Redwood's appearances on the podium this afternoon don't undermine the party's drive for normality.
