Clegg's bad faith has given the Tory leadership the opportunity to license guerrilla attacks by Tory ministers on the Lib Dems. This explains the recent spat on wind-farms, when the Tory minister responsible, the redoubtable John Hayes, denounced wind turbines to the horror of his notionally superior Lib Dem Cabinet minister, Ed Davey. This does not remotely make for good government but it doesn't half raise Tory morale. At Conservative headquarters, there is a fresh willingness to put the Lib Dems to the sword. More of Clegg's MPs now appear on the list of Tory target seats for the next election than the Conservative leadership originally envisaged. The Cameroons have come a long way from suggesting, during the honeymoon of the coalition, that the relationship between the two parties should be formalised in an electoral pact.

Unusually, what has made the biggest single difference in improving the optics for the Tories is a speech, the one Cameron gave to his party conference in the autumn. It was not only his best such offering to date: it may turn out to be genuinely important, which such speeches hardly ever are. Not because it was watched by the country, with a grateful electorate hanging on every word. These speeches are not consumed by large numbers of voters, although his party was listening. It was about ideas and contained a proper argument which he and the Tories could build on next year and beyond. 

At last Cameron seemed capable of making an authentically Conservative case on aspiration, reform and patriotism. After seven years as leader of his party, in Birmingham he finally found a coherent way of speaking to the "striving" classes, the people he really needs to reach, on the subject of opportunity and economic rebirth. Incidentally, surely Mitt "Mr 47 per cent" Romney's failure last month is much more likely to turn out to have been in this department rather than having anything to do with gay marriage. The Republican candidate lost because he was the representative of a rich elite and did nothing convincing to counter such perceptions. As the Chancellor who cut the top rate of tax from 50p to 45p for the highest paid, but who is simultaneously putting several million new Britons farther down the pay scale into the 40p tax band, Osborne might have problems in that regard too. Labour strategists certainly see his remoteness as one of their strongest campaigning cards. He should be worrying about that, and devising ways to deal with it through his work in the Treasury, not banging on about gay marriage.