´óÏó´«Ã½

Political commentators look ahead at what the Conservative party conference should bring this week.

The that for policies on economic growth, inconsistency and incoherence is perhaps the best the government can hope to achieve:

"A sharper, marketable growth strategy is fools' gold. There is no such thing. At best there is a range of competing contradictions and variations from which the government is being begged to choose. Jump too far in any one direction and the reputation for reasoned steadiness, which is Cameron's and the coalition's strength, would be lost...
Ìý
"In the wildest of economic circumstances, the party's best hope is to be dull this week. There are shocks enough elsewhere: the government, by contrast, must be a convincing and unshakeable shelter from the storm."

Conversely, , the current coalition makes it even more important the Tories are clear about what they stand for:

"Here is the dilemma for the Tory front bench: until we can unpick their true identity from the deliberately messy, interwoven knot that is the Coalition, we will have very little idea of what they would do if they got the chance to govern in their own right. And most potential Tory supporters would have no clear conception of what they were voting for in a general election. So if the Conservatives hope to win an outright victory next time round (and we will assume for the sake of argument that they do, though even this has been a matter of ambiguity and contradictory briefing), they must start right now - this week - making the case for it."

Conservative Lord Ashcroft says in the Daily Mail that policies to bring cuts
combined with growth should be at the centre of the conference:

"When it comes to policies for running Britain's economy in a global crisis, the complexity of the problem is such that many voters would admit they barely understand the questions, let alone the answers. People find themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to hope the Government knows what it is doing.
Ìý
For now, this works in the Government's favour - not least because most undecided voters do not think Labour offers any credible alternative. But many people would feel rather more reassured, and rather more inclined to back the Tories, if they felt that tackling the deficit was part of a bigger plan to boost the economy and improve life in Britain."

that whatever policies come out of the conference, people should resist criticising based on class:

"As the Tory conference rolls down the slipway, we shall observe an interesting atavism: the last sneering, generalising discrimination permitted in our liberal land. It is not the rough-and-tumble of combative politics, not healthy ideological disagreement. Ladies and gentlemen, prepare to witness Britain's last unpunishable hate crime: toff-bashing Toryphobia.
Ìý
"Automatic toff-bashing is boring, bullying and dull-witted. If the Conservatives talk nonsense at their conference, tell them so. But honestly."

But on the personality politics. He advices that politicians should stop attempting to be normal:

"If voters find Ed Miliband a strange and unfamiliar sort of human being, one wonders what they think of David Cameron. Now, whatever you think of the Prime Minister, it is perfectly pointless to pretend that most of the electorate have ever met anyone much like him. He represents a very small caste indeed, and some of his colleagues represent no one but themselves.
Ìý
"Rather than demand that politicians stop being weird, let us realise that "weirdness" is simply a quality of the exceptional, regarded with hostility. We may or may not admire the politician; some are both exceptional and atrocious; and some, of course, are very much weirder human beings than others. But let's not pretend that any of them are remotely normal. The politician who leads us, in the end, out of the current mess will, as a human being, probably be as weird as we can conceive."