LONDON: David Cameron, the leader of Britain’s opposition Conservative party, likes Blackpool. Two years ago he went to the Tory (Conservative) conference there as the outsider in a contest dominated by more experienced, heavyweight politicians. By the end of the conference week he was the frontrunner. Whatever the seaside air did during the contest for the Conservative leadership, his allies hope it can have the same galvanising effect for the general election.

“People are obviously slightly anxious,” one close friend admitted yesterday (Sept 28). “Gordon Brown (the prime minister) had a very strong summer. Our fightback was quite effective, but clearly hasn’t stopped Brown in his tracks. But David is a big-court player. He does better under pressure than when he’s playing on court 14 when it’s all a bit easy.”

With Labour 11 points ahead in a You-Gov/Channel 4 News poll this week and 10 points ahead in a Populus poll for the Times today, this is not the moment for a court 14 performance. Mr Brown will meet senior advisers to consider his options tomorrow, as the Tory conference starts. But a final decision will not come until after the prime minister weighs the reaction to the conference and Mr Cameron’s make-or-break speech on Wednesday.

Mr Cameron’s closest aides promise “clarity and inspiration”. But already they are fighting claims that they will retreat to their core vote. Labour expects a promise to scrap inheritance duties on first homes but the Tories insist that health and the environment will feature strongly too.

A new airline pollution duty, to be unveiled by the shadow chancellor (finance spokesman), George Osborne, on Monday, would be charged on all flights, with extra charges for the highest-polluting planes. Strategists believe Mr Cameron’s pro-green message was one reason for the poll leads he held early in his leadership, which have withered away under sustained attack from Mr Brown.

Mr Osborne has ruled out taxing consumers for taking their cars to out-of-town shopping centres, an idea proposed by the party’s policy review under Zac Goldsmith and John Gummer. They have also ditched an idea unveiled by Mr Cameron earlier in the year to give passengers an air miles allowance.

But frustrated senior Conservatives are adamant that neither these moves nor further pledges on crime or the environment amount to an effort to shore up the core vote ahead of the election. “I can’t remember the Tories ever going into an election promising a tax rise before,” one member of the shadow cabinet said last night.

Supporters of Mr Cameron say the green message is to be “balanced”. One frontbencher admitted: “We started on the wrong foot on the environment by thinking it was all about individual decisions. By far the biggest part is dynamic industrial change, it’s about shifting the economy.” Changing industry, rather than charging consumers, will be emphasised.

The Tories say they are ready for the general election: a draft manifesto is nearly there, all but around a dozen winnable seats have selected candidates and there is GBP10m in the bank, not including the cash offered by deputy chairman Lord Ashcroft out of his personal fortune to support favoured candidates in marginal seats at up to GBP25,000 a time.

That spending power worries Labour. The foreign secretary, David Miliband, warned this week: “There’s money going into marginal seats now on the Tory side, money going into marginal seats funded by Lord Ashcroft to unseat Labour MPs who are the difference between a Labour government and a Tory government.” One shadow cabinet member said: “We’ll outspend them 2-1, they’ll get walloped in Scotland, we’ll take their southern marginals ... and then we’re into a hung parliament.”

Some council by-election results on Thursday also gave the Tories grounds for optimism, with a gain in Sunderland and favourable swings – though no wins – in wards in Corby and Portsmouth. The results were far from uniform, however, and won’t be enough in themselves to dissuade Mr Brown from calling an election.

Yet it is impossible to disguise the note of panic in many Tory voices at the prospect of a snap poll. The conference guide, printed weeks ago, is subtitled: “Shaping our election manifesto.” This was to be a mid-term conference, a bridge between the two-year policy review and the creation of a programme for the electorate. Now it is an old-style pre-election rally.

Mr Cameron’s spokesman has denied that the party is shifting to the right to shore up its core vote. One frontbencher close to Mr Cameron said Mr Brown had moved the centre ground himself. “British politics has shifted slightly to the right. Now we can talk about immigration and crime without behaving like complete nutcases. There’s a degree to which we’ve got to play catch-up. Really the centre ground isn’t where it was two years ago. The centre ground isn’t absolute and underlying and we have got to recalibrate.”

Mr Cameron’s aides promise an aggressively “future-focused” conference pitched to the electorate. “It’s about really making it clear where we stand on the big issues. That hasn’t always been evident over the last couple of years,” a key aide said. The Tories want to contrast what they say is the prime minister’s “short-term thinking” with Mr Cameron’s “long-term change”. One moderniser said: “It’s all very well for Brown to go after trying to peel off 4 per cent of people in the middle of the dividing line, but what about the 40 per cent of people who don’t vote? There is a new world where people have totally different expectations about what they can achieve ... David gets this new world.”

Mr Cameron has five days to make it get him.—Dawn/ The Guardian News Serviec