When a promising young Tory MP urges his party to discard the social policy thinking of Sir Winston Churchill in favour of Polly Toynbee's it may be time to concentrate. What today's Guardian reports Greg Clark MP as advocating, David Cameron is expected to endorse when he delivers his Scarman lecture on the theme of poverty on Friday.
It will be as dramatic as other Cameron reversals of recent party orthodoxy. In a pamphlet prepared for the party's social justice policy group (chair: Iain Duncan Smith) Mr Clark, MP for Tunbridge Wells since 2005, and his co-author, Peter Franklin, are saying "poverty is relative and social exclusion matters".
This is big stuff, a bit like Labour abandoning its Clause IV commitment to nationalise stuff. It may be unfair to blame Churchill, a progressive social reformer in his time, for saying that he wanted a ladder of opportunity and a safety net below. The real culprits, who rejected the One Nation Tory orthodoxy of 50 years, were Margaret Thatcher and acolytes like John Moore, who famously declared in 1989 that absolute poverty was over in Britain.
It wasn't and it isn't. But that is not the point. What the Cameron Tories are now accepting is that absolute standards rise as affluence grows and, more important, that relative poverty is real. People without TV or a phone in 2006 are effectively excluded from mainstream society. It is a New Labour mantra.
But government ministers and thinktank rivals like the IPPR will be waiting to see exactly what the Tory leader himself says. After all, Mr Cameron is better on tone than specifics. Only last month he used the Forsythe report (a Thatcherish call for tax cuts) to distance himself from such rough talk.
This time allies insist he means it, however it pumps up the blood pressure of Toynbee-bashing commentators. It is not as if the late Keith Joseph, Lady Thatcher's mentor, did not struggle to break the "cycle of deprivation", or that David Willetts did not declare years ago the Tory war on single parents was over.
Mr Duncan Smith suffered his own conversion when confronted with grinding poverty on Glasgow's estates. Yet disquiet with Mr Cameron's centre-ground strategy is quietly growing. Outside the big cities, some MPs report, Tory activists privately hate it.
Only this week, Lord (Maurice) Saatchi joined the chorus of old lags like Normans Tebbit and Lamont in warning against "the pragmatism of the centre ground" - and how it may foster cynicism among voters. Some leftwing MPs say the same of Blairism. It is the prospect of winning that stays doubters, so that today's Guardian/ICM poll gives hope to both sides.
The Tories are ahead by 37:32:22%, but by nowhere near enough to feel comfortable. With Gordon Brown in No 10 next year they squeeze the Lib Dems (40:32:20%), helpful but not enough. A veteran Labour MP says: "I've decided that Cameron is not the Tory Neil Kinnock, he's their fourth Michael Foot."