Budget mystery: what are the Cameron team up to?

One of the more puzzling things about Alistair Darling's Budget - universally accepted as one of the most painful for the country for decades - is the Tories' apparent inability to quickly come up with a coherent line of attack.

Was it all about massive debt levels, hidden spending cuts, political tricks aimed at wrong-footing them, or made-up forecasts? The growth forecasts are already giving Darling a serious headache and today's figures showing the economy has contracted far more than predicted have raised questions over whether the Chancellor was aware of the reality when he delivered his Budget but omitted to mention it.

Far more important for the Tories, however, is the clamour from the media and voters for Cameron to offer some clarity about his own position and spell out exactly where his "austerity" measures would hit if he wins the next election.

The lack of clarity is partly explained by the fact that Darling took a leaf out of his predecessor's book and buried some of the bad news in the detail of the famous Treasury Red Book which is published after the Budget speech and set outs all the figures in stark detail.

But it was also clear the Tories were struggling to decide which was the strongest line and just where they should position themselves in preparation for the election campaign without falling into some Brownite political trap.

With the latest opinion poll for the Daily Telegraph showing the Tories with an 18-point post-Budget lead over the Government, it is pretty clear Labour is currently losing the election. But that will not be enough for the Tories to automatically win it.

There were no clearer answers from Cameron when interviewed on BBC Radio's Today programme this morning. He repeated the old chestnut about abolishing the expensive ID cards scheme, reviewing tax credits for the better-off and slashing away at the "Quangocracy". Nothing new there: what about the real big money - in welfare payments, schools and hospitals?

The obvious answers are, first, that the Tories simply do not know what they will do, they are still working on it. And second, they don't want to terrify voters with talk of taking the axe to vital services. There may be other answers, however.

Cameron is terrified of Gordon Brown's famous political traps and fears that any big spending cuts he proposes will immediately be examined by Labour to see whether they would prove popular and could therefore be stolen. That would offer both extra savings for the Chancellor and limit the Tories' room for manoeuvre - two birds despatched with one stone.

Another has been suggested by former Tory frontbencher Michael Portillo, who reckons Cameron may want to take a leaf out of Margaret Thatcher's book and say one thing before the election but do something radically different afterwards.

Under this scenario, Cameron would continue to suggest he is on the centre ground and not offer anything radical that might frighten the horses. Once he got into power, however, the covers would come off a radical, shiny, new-look Cameron who would take radical measures to slash the size of the state - one of the Tories' great ideological platforms - and that, as Portillo suggests, would represent an historic re-casting of the political debate. It also sounds extremely painful. ·