So how do the fashion-conscious respond if presented with the large pile of Conservative policy?

In my experience, they usually respond that such detail is all very well, but that they can hardly be expected to spend wakeful nights reading hundreds of pages of worthy and detailed policy programmes. No, what they want to see is clarity of purpose, direction and method. In other words, they want the bold lines of policy, not the fiddly detail. 

But this secondary response is at least as bizarre as the primary assertion that David Cameron has yet to reveal his policies. The Conservative programme carefully constructed over the course of the past three years (whether one agrees with it or not) is not only detailed. It also has a unified purpose and employs well-identified and consistent methods to move the country in a clear direction.

Its purpose is to achieve the progressive ends of rebuilding our broken economy, mending our broken society and fixing our broken politics.

Its method is to apply Conservative means: in other words, to strengthen society rather than the state; to give more power to the people through increased localisation, transparency, choice and accountability; and to encourage enterprise by liberating individuals, communities and businesses from the dead hand of excessive bureaucracy.

And the direction in which the programme seeks to take Britain is into a post-bureaucratic age. The ambition is to liberate the energies and reinforce the social bonds of our people so that they can achieve what has not been achieved and will never be achieved by the mechanisms of centralised bureaucratic micro-management.

Perhaps the fashion-conscious, faced with the fact of a large amount of detailed policy, and faced also with this description of purpose, method and direction, will next resort to the tertiary argument that "there may be policies and there may be purposes, method and direction, but what is the sign that the two are connected?"

But this tertiary argument is as curious as its primary and secondary companions. Look at Conservative proposals to liberate schools, hospitals and GPs from Whitehall micro-management and to make them depend upon the ability to attract pupils and patients. Or take the Conservative proposals for using the voluntary sector to move people from welfare to work and to rehabilitate prisoners on the basis of payment by results. Or consider the proposals for line-by-line transparency in government accounts, detailed neighbourhood crime maps (allied to elected police commissioners) and transparent information about outcomes for patients at each hospital and GP practice — or, indeed, the plans for local housing trusts, mayors in our cities, a new general power of competence for local governments, or the various proposals for referendums and rights of initiative for electors. Wherever you look, and regardless of whether you agree or disagree with what you see, you are bound to spot a pattern in these policies — the same general themes, the same purposes, the same methods, the same decentralising, de-bureaucratising direction.