here is one very important question that the Cameron Conservatives have never answered – at least not consistently. If it is not addressed over the next six weeks, I believe that there will be significantly less chance of a Tory majority at the election.

Here it is: what exactly does this Government expect of me – or you? As an ordinary person who wishes to behave conscientiously and hopes to be rewarded (or at least not penalised) for my actions – what am I supposed to be doing? This may sound, to the tacticians among us, hopelessly philosophical, but I have heard it asked in various forms by an extraordinary number of very down-toearth people for whom it has actual practical consequences.

George Osborne’s famously political Budget may have been aggressively marketed as an anti-Labour nuclear device, but oddly, for all its calculated positioning, it seemed to pull back from a clear statement that might have put an end to the confusion. I’m quite sure that the Chancellor will regard this judgment as deeply unfair. After all, there was at least one unambiguous message in his otherwise underwhelming proposals: this Government believes that saving is a good thing. So we will stop taxing most people on the interest that they earn on their savings.

This is, of course, less bountiful than it sounds since interest rates are now so low that the Treasury gets next to nothing by taxing savings interest, but it did at least point in the direction of some kind of ethical vision. Even more important was the introduction of flexibility in ISA conditions: in future, you will be able to withdraw funds and then re-invest them without losing your tax-free advantage. In other words, Mr Osborne was giving you an additional method of tax avoidance – which, at other points in his speech, he castigated as an unmitigated evil.

So which is it? Is it always immoral to avoid tax, even though that is one way of helping to achieve the kind of financial security and independence that the Conservatives espouse? If it is, then why is the Government creating more ways to do it? Or is it only acceptable to avoid those sorts of tax that hit not-very-well-off people who are managing to save little bits of money?

If that is what the Tories are actually saying, then it goes to the heart of their contradictory message: it is fine to strive – that is what we want to encourage – but as soon as you arrive at your destination (any degree of security and independence) you become fair game. This is what the beef about higher rate income tax was all about. There is great official sympathy and support for those who are struggling to work hard, to improve the prospects of their own their families, etc. But when they succeed in their aspiration to pull away from poverty, by earning roughly one and a half times the national average wage, they get clobbered with what used to be called super-tax. Obviously the Chancellor has heard the wailing and lamentation on this point. He could hardly have missed it. So he offered a teeny-weeny concession on the higher-rate tax threshold with a promise of more teeny-weeny concessions to follow over the coming years: it was a down payment, a statement of intention. But it was such a tiny gesture that it smacked more of reluctant surrender than of real belief.

So again, you may ask: which is it? Do the Tories want me to earn as much as I can so that I can give my family the advantages that will help them on their way, and save for my old age so that I never become a burden on the state? Or do they want to penalise me for earning (and saving) more than some other people do? How can it be morally desirable to want to succeed, but undesirable to achieve success?

Rather depressingly, I don’t actually believe that the Conservatives are capable of resolving this. This isn’t because they fail to see the contradictions, but because they find it politically impossible to say what would have to be said to make their position coherent. The great obstacle to clarity is the Left-wing shibboleth of equality. The Tories have sold the pass on that old debate about whether the aim should be to provide equality of opportunity or equality of outcome. Most of the time David Cameron and his team talk as if they are committing themselves entirely (and exclusively) to the goal of equal opportunity. Their explicit electoral promises include the luminously clear, “a job for everyone who wants one”, “a Britain that rewards work”, and “the best start in life for every child”. But when it comes to the fiscal crunch, they are made uncomfortable by disparities of outcome, which is to say income – even when those disparities are the result of seeking employment, working hard, and making an effort at school. They still seem to feel that they must level down the gains of people who have done all the things that the Tories told them they ought to do.

This kind of bourgeois guilt is not confined to the privileged class from which the Tory leadership springs but they have it in an especially acute form. It involves, paradoxically, a paternalistic (and patronising) view of the poor coupled with a peculiarly vindictive attitude to the middle classes even though they may only have emerged from poverty a generation before. Nobody seems prepared to enunciate the obvious truth: if you encourage people – and provide them with a good chance – to make maximum use of their abilities, some of them are going to do better than others.

All that governments can do is to ensure that the greatest possible range of opportunities is made available to the greatest possible number of individuals. But even if that is done, some people will succeed and others will not. This might be because (as the Left would claim) the successful had hidden advantages: more devoted or ambitious families, or the good fortune to live in a supportive community. Perhaps. But nobody in real life thinks that differences of that kind could be completely eradicated, nor do they think it is appropriate for government to try to do so. Few political campaigns have been as nasty and counter-productive as the attempt to denigrate “pushy (conscientious) parents”. Again, which is it? Is ambition a social virtue – but only if your achievements never exceed the average?

Well, as I said, this Tory leadership is never going to say the only thing that could be said to make sense of all this. They will go on trying to flatten the differentials between those who really do maximise their potential, and those who – for one reason or another – do not, even while they are extolling “aspiration” and enterprise. That argument has been lost.

But there is another one that came through quite clearly in Mr Osborne’s remarks in the Budget. Indeed, he said it explicitly: he is determined to provide more freedom for people to make their own choices about what they will do with their money. Hence, the flexible ISA arrangements that allow you to take money out to make what use of it you will, and then put it back in within a given year. Add to that the liberty to sell the annuity in which you might have been trapped before the great pension supply side revolution of his previous Budget. Yes, there certainly was a message there: we trust the great majority of people to make their own decisions, to use their earnings and their savings in ways that suit their lives and priorities. That is what most grown-ups expect to do. Not a bad mantra for an election campaign.