Nothing has changed for David Cameron

As someone almost once said, there's no such thing as the Big Society. Well not anymore there isn't, as Cameron's flagship election theme now turns out to have been about as electrifying as Battersea Power Station is these days. Abandoned with a desperate determination a drowning man spying a not-yet melted bit of icecap would do well to rival, now we've got a retreat to trite little pledges . Cameron's contract with Britain is not even concise, let alone precise. No Blairite '97 pledge card this: tiny yet verbose promises, but absolutely minute prospects see the Tory Party under Cameron's lethal leadership not sleepwalking to defeat, but ululating to catastrophe . Much as I love the smell of improvisation in the morning, it would be so much more comforting if the grids now comprehensively trashed inside CCHQ reflected a realistic appreciation of where the Tory campaign is, rather than merely an unavoidable acknowledgment of how unsustainable Plan Hilton always was. Take the militantly absurdist Tory reaction to the last debate. This was a triumph! a triumph, do you hear me? Where do you start? The fact that after the first debate nothing has changed, when the Tory Party, which isn't even going to get to form a minority government on its own on present form, pressingly needed substantial, decisive change and didn't get it? That all the scores at the end reflected were the scores on the doors going in? Which is to say, of course Cameron got a marginally higher rating from viewers: he had a marginally higher number of them already supporting him when the programme started, and good golly, he didn't alienate anymore of them than he had to by the end of it. Tories, to understand the hole the party is in, could of course reflect on the fact that not only did the last two debates change nothing, they really shouldn't have changed anything . After all, what could the sterile artifice of the debates ever have told us other than the respective capacity of the three men involved for sterile artifice? And this should decide Prime Ministers? Thank God the electorate evidently thinks otherwise. Not that you would know that from the propagandists and placemen who pass themselves off as journalists in too many Tory papers. Even though exactly the same routine was tried after the very first debate – the print pundits overwhelmingly proclaimed a sort of rhetorical Manstein Plan as having been executed by the vaunted champion of PMQs against the rotten defences of Brown and the squishy ineffectuality of Clegg, then promptly fell flat on their faces – off they ran again after the last one with their expert accounts of Cameron's 'victory'. And the polls have stayed just as they were. The same phenomenon was on display over Bigotgate by the broadcast media. Indeed, for British political journalism on television, radio and online, this was close to being a collective OJ Simpson moment in its self-fixated, process driven vapidity: "he's gone into the house! Gordon Brown's gone into her house!" Yet what did the Tory response really reveal? In the same week that Cameron dismissed a Tory candidate foolish enough to have caused a fuss, and not be married to a school chum of his, back stood our great progressive, this wonderful "liberal Conservative" when a woman asked the prime minister what I assumed had to be a trick question: "where are all these Eastern Europeans coming from?" Does anyone doubt that if this been a Tory candidate asking such a question Cameron would have ditched them on the spot? The falsity screams through Cameron's every act, even the pointed inactions, as over Mrs Duffy, and still the cheerleaders pretend that the public doesn't notice. The polls can tell us just what they think, but the Tory commentariat, with a few honourable, albeit largely ultramontane and ex-Trot exceptions , clutch their pay cheques and insists upon the reverse. At some point surely even the most demented pom-pom girl for Cameron is going to realise just how counter-productive proclaiming black-as-white is? There's a reason why we're are not being invited to be members of the government of Britain anymore. There's a reason why this asinine "Tory contract" flails between defensively responding to attacks from other parties and offering promises smaller than Andy Coulson's shame gland. It's the same reason that explains the astonishing decision to throw away a PEB on the " Hung Parliament Party ". It's the same reason why despite their unparalleled record of post-war fiscal incompetence, Darling and Brown have still framed the terms of the economic debate. The Tory campaign has failed and is failing. No matter how detailed the communiqués describing battlefield glories, in Birmingham, thanks to Mrs Duffy, or wherever else they're imagined, they're not detailing what has happened, and the positions of the parties stay just as they are. Or just as they have been since the public saw Clegg and said he's not untrustworthy. The only thing that could make this last week worse for Cameron would be if traditional Tory voters were told that he was fit for faint approval from The Guardian . Oh dear. It won't be you wot won it for Nick, but you've certainly done your bit today to lose it for Dave.