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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: At last week’s Labour conference, Ed Miliband gave a very strong speech that surprised his critics and delighted his fans. Now it’s David Cameron’s turn this week so can he convince his party that he’s up to the job? I’ll be putting that to the Chancellor, George Osborne, later in the programme but now though I’m joined by Tim Loughton who was an education minister until the last reshuffle, we’ve got the political editor at the Sunday Express, Kirsty Buchanan and the Observer’s chief political columnist, Andrew Rawnsley, to discuss the Conservative conference ahead. Let’s start with the issue of the centre ground up for grabs, Andrew. Has Ed Miliband successfully moved Labour into that territory and David Cameron is going to have to fight to get it back?

ANDREW RAWNSLEY: You don’t move a party to that territory with just one speech but it was an audacious land grab by the Labour leader at Manchester for that very important bit of ground which appeals to centrist mainstream voters and one that the challenge is for David Cameron, is he going to cede that ground to Ed Miliband or is he going to contest for it in his speech. One of the gifts David Cameron certainly used to have, one of the reasons he was a reasonably successful leader of the opposition, was an ability to reach out to people who wouldn’t normally be supposed to be Conservative voters. That’s something he’s rather lost and of course another thing that we may talk about, Dermot, is he is being stalked by a predatory blond in Birmingham, namely one Boris Johnson, who according to the polling does have that gift, he is somebody who can appeal to non-Tory voters and after all, if the Conservatives want to win a majority or even be the biggest party at the next election, they are going to have to get the votes of people who don’t regard themselves as tribal Conservatives.

DM: Okay, well we’ll bring in predatory blonds a little bit later on Andrew, but this issue of the centre ground. Mr Cameron is trying to make the point that Ed Miliband talked about it but actually didn’t move his party towards it.

KIRSTY BUCHANAN: I think the point they are going to make about the Miliband speech was it was very good rhetoric but it was hollow rhetoric, it was very policy light, there’s nothing really to flesh out. When you march your rhetorical tank onto the centre ground, what do you plan to do with it? The benefit again of being in government of course is you can actually roll out a lot of policies at conference and say we are on the centre ground, we are the party of the strivers, we are the party of the aspirational and we are going to prove it by announcing it at conference. So you have got the council tax freeze this morning, you’ve got the rail fare cap again for another couple of years and I think you’ll find Cameron is going to try and deal with this disconnect issue by saying that they are the party for the squeezed middle if you like, the hard pressed working families and they have the policies and they can deliver on them.

DM: So Tim Loughton, they have to try and reintroduce that idea that you are the party of the strivers when you have rather over-concentrated on the austerity message up to this point?

TIM LOUGHTON: Yes, I think people want to see some hope and this is about aspiration as well. We have taken a lot of pain in the last couple of years and a lot of people in different circumstances have taken a lot of pain. We need to see some light at the end of the tunnel and I hope we see some good figures on the economy over the next few months. We mustn’t be complacent, I think people want to know that the government is in control, the government is on their side and the government absolutely understands and acknowledges the tough times that everybody has had to take and we have had some serious policies to help that along and if we hadn’t had those serious policies the economy in this country would be in a much more dire state than it is and that’s the difference that a Conservative led government has made.

DM: Let me bring in now the Boris ‘blond bombshell’ factor, if that doesn’t stick, if the economy doesn’t really turn and the signs there are very, very muted at the moment, does Boris become more of a threat in terms of the leadership?

TL: I don't know, I think it’s a sideshow frankly. Boris is a fantastic character, very media savvy, very high recognition, is doing a fantastic job as Mayor of London. He is not going to be Prime Minister of this country, he is not going to be leader of the Conservative party.

AR: I would quarrel with Tim about that. One thing we know, they having this huge rally staged by Conservative Home for him on Monday night, then there is Boris’s own speech to the conference on the Tuesday morning, I’m not sure how insouciant you can be about this if you are in the cabinet. We know Boris will attract bigger audiences and get from them a more fervent reception than probably any member of the cabinet except possibly David Cameron himself, because he looks like a winner. I think this is part of it, he has won twice in London which is naturally a more Labour city and I think it is a challenge. I agree with you that there is not going to be any leadership challenge from Boris any time soon or maybe not so soon, he is not even an MP never mind not being in the cabinet at the moment but there he is and you can see he is attracting a lot of Conservatives because he just allows them to think oh, what if, if we had Boris with all his inspiration and optimism in charge.

DR: Like another blond bombshell from the past, always a darling of the Conservative party, Michael Heseltine and he didn’t make leader.

AR: Yes, but he did bring down Margaret Thatcher even if he never made leader.

KB: I think it is impossible to overstate Boris’s ambition and whilst obviously the timing I don't think is right for him now, he has not shown any signs of soft-pedalling to give Cameron an easy ride this week. Earlier on this week he was saying that the aviation capacity decision to kick it into the long grass was an economic catastrophe and a lamentable decision. If that’s a guy soft-pedalling to help Cameron out I’d hate to see him coming at him at full tilt. In Tory terms, Boris is the closest thing the Tories have got to a rock god. It’s true, you see him arrive at conference and he is absolutely mobbed. I went one year and he had said or done something a bit naughty and he was completely mobbed and he had to hide in the press office, the makeshift press office and all the snappers got ladders and scaled the barricades and trapped him in his lair. His speech unfortunately is on the Tuesday, the leader’s speech is on the Wednesday, it will be fascinating to see who has grabbed all the headlines on the Wednesday morning.

AR: The Prime Minister will not want to be upstaged at his own conference by the Mayor of London and Boris did upstage him comprehensively through the Olympics.

TL: Boris is a big beast in the party, we have had lots of big beasts in the party before who have never made leadership but as a celebrity he is doing the Conservative party an awful lot of good because people connect with him. I have gone out and canvassed for him in parts of London that wouldn’t normally vote Conservative and they’ve said, oh yes, we like Boris, we’ll vote for Boris.

DM: Let’s move on from Boris but look at David Cameron, he is unpopular within sections of the party, I don't know how you feel about him after being reshuffled but the fact is, he has to regain the love or at least the admiration of the party and they have to feel that he is leading them somehow, somewhere to some sunlit upland.

TL: That’s right and I think this week is about a bit of reassurance for the party as well. The party needs a bit of love. The ironic thing is that the government has taken some really big tough decisions on the economy, on austerity and actually people have gone with it and understood it and it is on some of these side issues, we can mention a whole load of them where actually the government has got into trouble, has lost a lot of credibility with its own supporters and it is a sideshow. What David Cameron needs to do at this conference is say look, I’m in charge, this is a government that knows where it’s going, this is a government that has made tough decisions. We have got to see this out and concentrate on the really big financial and economic issues and just park at one side some of the things that have been causing a lot of annoyance and actually hit above their weight, cause a lot of headlines but don’t really matter in getting this country back on track.

DL: Do you feel those so-called side issues, and I guess you are looking at the more recent things like the rail fiasco, budget U-turns, swearing at police officers in Downing Street, have damaged the image of the government? Are they just sideshows or are they beginning to do lasting damage?

KB: The that you think of them as sideshows is, with respect, some of the problem. This is where the disconnect comes. The economic consequences of an age of austerity is a very real falling in people’s living standards, the sharpest fall in living standards in living memory, stagnating wages, rising inflation, rising commodity prices and to have these … what you’re looking for when you’ve got that is a sense that someone feels your pain, someone has a plan and that they can deliver with confidence. The Mitchell was incredibly damaging insofar as it emphasises that disconnect between the arrogant posh boys and the squeezed middle classes and the rail fiasco was a huge problem for them because it undermines their credibility in delivering competence. So from that point of view, from March onwards we had the omni shambles budget, then we had a doldrums of a summer where they sort of drifted around. We had an attempt at a reshuffle and quite a good reshuffle I have to say, quite a clever reshuffle and then that was completely torpedoed two or three weeks down the line by Mitchell-gate and this fantastic fiasco of the West Coast Mainline.

TL: These things are important, is the point, I’m not saying they’re not important, the whole Mitchell thing has been hugely deeply damaging but what happened there, what happened with the budget over the pasty tax or whatever are tiny issues in terms of getting the economy back on track.

DM: But it’s what Kirsty’s saying, it’s the perception of not feeling everyone’s pain. How do they get that message across, Andrew?

AR: It is very difficult. David Cameron will want to talk to his party, quite a lot of which is in a fractious mood but the most important thing is to talk to the country. He had a very valuable thing I think as leader of the opposition and then in the first year or eighteen months of the government people did give him the benefit of the doubt, the government generally. Quite a lot of people buy the ‘we’re all in this together’ and that’s why I think, whatever you think of them in terms of economic and fiscal policy, the cut to the top rate of tax in the budget which David Cameron has admitted in an interview this morning he had his own worries about how that would look, was a major strategic mistake and that’s why it was, in terms of how the public view the Conservative party and that’s why Labour returned to that again and again at its conference in Manchester because it made it pretty much impossible for them ever to say again we’re all in this together.

DM: What is interesting is tactically they saw it, they identified it themselves as an elephant trap left by Gordon Brown and the last administration and then they walked right into it.

AR: I know in the private discussions before that budget with George Osborne and Nick Clegg, David Cameron was very worried about – although he bought the intellectual case for doing it, the idea it will make people work harder and strive etc – but he was really, really worried about it and is probably kicking himself to this day that he gave in to his Chancellor when he agreed to do that cut.

DM: In all those issues of all in it together, there’s other taxes. We’ve heard Nick Clegg say I think I’ll get us into better gear if I talk to the Prime Minister about wealth taxes or mansion taxes but it seems they have just been completely ruled out altogether.

TL: I think that’s important because actually we’re going to get the economy back on track not by taxing people more, it is actually by taking more people out of tax and encouraging more people to invest, set up business, employ people, get people back into jobs. The high rate tax cut was a difficult one because presentation is very difficult. You are supposedly giving extra money back to people who are already paying a lot of tax but actually when you look at it in detail, what it’s about is making sure that people pay tax at all because we were facing a serious haemorrhaging of higher rate tax payers going to Zurich, setting up businesses over there, so it is not a question of whether they paid 50p or 45p, it was a question of whether they paid 50p or nothing at all because they were paying it to the Swiss or other countries at a lower rate. That’s the intellectual argument we had to have, presentationally it is really difficult and obviously the opposition will take …

DM: Kirsty, of all the budget measures, we talked about the smaller ones and perhaps insignificant ones as Tim put it there, but this is a big one.

KB: Sadly I think they’re going to have to die in a ditch on this one. Politics is the art of presentation and you can argue about the facts of revenue raising – it shouldn’t have been cut then and it is hugely damaging and to raise taxes on working class holidays through the static caravan tax and pasties and pensions at the same time, that is going to be your Iraq war I think in that sense. It is very interesting that you’ve got a spending review now where the Chancellor is this morning coming out saying no mansion tax, no wealth tax when two weeks ago Nick Clegg was saying if I don’t get movement on this I’m going to veto the spending review so next year is going to be very interesting.

DM: We have the Chancellor coming up but thank you all very much indeed, Tim, Kirsty and Andrew, very good to see you all.