There are exceptions, of course. Michael Gove has declared that the Tories will only win if they can convince voters that they are “warriors for the dispossessed” and demonstrate that they “are in public service to help the people who need us, not just those who agree with us”. Though his speech contained declarations of support for the Prime Minister, it was in fact an attack on the aridness of the Tory message as Cameron, Osborne and Crosby have conceived it. He lavished praise on Iain Duncan Smith’s “moral” mission to get people off benefits and into work. Mr Gove and IDS are the two ministers who have shown over the past five years that they are driven by moral conviction. What are we to make of the fact that Mr Gove has lost his job as a reforming Education Secretary, and Mr Duncan Smith had to fight to keep his post as Work and Pensions Secretary?

Only 24 hours after Mr Gove’s intervention, Tories in the safe seat of Kensington exhibited the same complacency and narrowness that characterise the national campaign. Following the forced resignation of Sir Malcolm Rifkind, they were presented with a choice of candidates between Victoria Borwick, the wife of an hereditary peer, and Shaun Bailey, a black youth worker. They plumped for the former. Lord and Lady Borwick live in Phillimore Gardens, where houses change hands for at least £10 million, while Mr Bailey, though born in North Kensington, cannot afford to live in the constituency. I’m sure Lady Borwick is able, but so is Mr Bailey, and he speaks to the “dispossessed” in a way she never can.

Why is it that most of our leading politicians seem like pygmies in comparison with their predecessors of 30 or 40 years ago? They are not less intelligent, though they are usually younger and more callow. What makes them seem slighter figures is their lack of depth, the limited scope of their preoccupations.

To return to David Cameron: it’s a truism that you can never really change politicians. The Prime Minister is as much a product of his background as Margaret Thatcher was of hers. We can’t expect him to think like her, and we wouldn’t like it if he tried.  But I still nonetheless retain some hope that he is something more than the slightly smug, managerial, professional politician without deep and lasting convictions that he so often appears to be.

After all, it was Mr Cameron who adopted the idea of the “Big Society”. The problem did not lie in the concept, a stirring one which most decent people would wish to embrace, but in the lack of rigorous thought behind it. Whereas it should have emerged organically from prolonged discussion and reflection, it was somehow plonked down half-formed, and inevitably attracted ridicule. Mr Cameron then lost interest in it, and the words can no longer be uttered without a giggle.

His critics on Right and Left will say it was only a stunt. Perhaps it was. But let me air an alternative theory—which is that the Tory leader is in his way a religious man, and has grown more so, perhaps as a consequence of the deaths of his son Ivan and of his father, whom he seems to have loved and revered. In 2008 he told the Guardian that his faith was “a bit like the reception for Magic FM in the Chilterns: it sort of comes and goes”. But by Easter of last year he was describing himself as being “evangelical” about his Christian faith, and even went so far as to criticise some non-believers for failing to grasp the role that religion can have in “helping people to have a moral code”.