Bruce Anderson: Chaos, flash floods and stagnant pools - an apt metaphor for the state of the Tory party

The Thames Valley nurtures a quintessential English landscape and some equally attractive architecture. Over the centuries, the rich farmland has financed churches, manor houses and pretty villages - as well as a lot of jolly good pubs. But once every so often, living in a river valley has disadvantages.

David Cameron spent much of yesterday inspecting flood waters in his constituency. The flooding delayed his departure for Rwanda, where he is due to launch his new foreign aid policy. But it was convenient for him to spend some additional hours in the UK. Chaos, flash floods, stagnant pools: an apt metaphor for the current state of sections of the Tory party.

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It has never been easy to lead the Tories in opposition. Tories regard themselves as the national party: the rightful British National Party. Modern Toryism combines the two great British political traditions. On the one hand, there is a belief in authority and a reverence for our glorious past: on the other, individual freedom and economic dynamism. If those are not potent ideas, why does Gordon Brown pretend to believe in them?

As the true national party, the Tory Party also regards itself as the natural party of government. Tories do not believe that any other party should be entrusted with the national interest. They could also argue that every non-Tory government after Palmerston ended in failure. Tories know they will lose an election from time to time. But defeat should be a brief respite for fresh thinking, not a 40-year schlep around the Sinai Desert. One Parliament should be enough to reinvigorate the party and persuade the country to return to its true allegiance.

Given all that, it is never easy to lead a Tory opposition. The troops are likely to blame any delay in returning to power on incompetent map-reading by the leadership. After 10 years, and during a distinct shortage of manna, nerves are strained and tempers frayed.

The social changes of the past few decades have also made it harder to control Tory MPs. As recently as the early Sixties, the Tory parliamentary party was largely upper-class in membership and almost every Tory MP had served in the forces. So they had been moulded in hierarchical institutions - old-fashioned public schools, regiments, staid City firms or barristers' chambers - in which the young were taught to obey orders before being gradually allowed to give them. In those days, moreover, even highly intelligent Tory MPs would have looked askance if they had been described as intellectuals. That was not the sort of thing you would want said of you.

Although there were backbench revolts in the Fifties, they arose out of great issues such as Suez. There was none of the sullen, panicky muttering to any passing media outlet which is now so widespread. The knights of the shire were much easier to manage than today's esquires of the suburbs, many of whom regard themselves as intellectuals and thus entitled to express dissent at the drop of an opinion-poll rating. Their intellectual credentials are impeccable, by the Manhattan definition: "An intellectual is a voice in search of an ear''. Less so in the British version: "Empty vessels make the most noise".

David Cameron is unmoved by the murmuring in the ranks. He has policy plans for the next few weeks; he has no plans to alter them. It is unfortunate that his trip to Rwanda should take place now. It was organised well before the by-elections and before anyone could know that it might seem inappropriate.

That said, the new policy document on foreign aid is intellectually impressive; one would expect nothing less from a text produced under Peter Lilley's chairmanship. There has also been considerable input from Bob Geldof, and those of us who thought that his involvement was a gimmick now stand refuted. At the outset, he told Peter Lilley that he had read almost everything on aid and met almost everyone involved. This turned out to be true. Someone who observed Sir Bob at meetings said that if he had not recognised him, he would have assumed that this was an Irish academic who had escaped from the pages of a Malcolm Bradbury novel.

Even so, the demand for the Lilley/Geldof report will not quite rival Harry Potter. Norman Tebbit has a point. Foreign aid will not persuade disillusioned Tories to return to the party. There will be some much more Tebbit-friendly proposals later in the week, with Pauline Neville-Jones's conclusions on homeland security. In terms of appealing to the Tory heartlands with tough-minded and thoughtful policies, it will continue the good work of Iain Duncan Smith's family policy group. But more is needed.

Gordon Brown has two advantages: force of personality and possession of 10 Downing Street. For the time being, that clunking personality has not broken out into the truculent, contemptuous solipsism which characterised so much of his dealings with ministerial colleagues over the past 10 years. Wait until something goes wrong.

But no wise opposition leader relies on his opponents' mistakes. Gordon Brown is convinced that he can win the intellectual arguments. The son of the manse is not prepared to respect the son of the old rectory, so David Cameron will have to mount a sustained challenge and vindicate his own intellectual credentials.

This should not be hard for him. It must be remembered that Mr Cameron got a first at Oxford without being a slave to his books. He has a strong and clear intelligence. But this has not yet communicated itself to the general public, partly because some of Mr Cameron's advisors are guilty of a strategic misjudgement. They assume that because we live in an age of dumbed-down politics, in which tone and sentiment seem to be so much more important than intellectual argument, there would be no point in Mr Cameron's making the sort of speeches which Margaret Thatcher so relished in the 1970s.

She did not regard the word "intellectual" as a quasi-libel. Indeed, she was the first Tory leader to consider it a term of unreserved approval, and she liked people to use it about her. In this, she and they were mistaken. Although she has a powerful mind, Margaret Thatcher is not an intellectual. She had no interest in the play of ideas. She merely used her ideas as a truncheon to batter her opponents.

Mr Cameron is an intellectual. He has read and thought a great deal about politics and about the human condition. Over the next few weeks, he ought to share some of the fruits of that thinking with the voters. Until he does that, he will not be able to prevent Gordon Brown from seeming more substantial. It is likely that events will trip up the new premier. He has already demonstrated a combination of rigidity and discomfort at PM's Questions. This is a man who is uneasy as soon as he moves beyond the certainties of his brief. But Mr Cameron must prove that he has intellectual weight.

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