It can only be good news if the Tories are serious about poverty. Tunbridge Wells may be affronted when its MP, Greg Clark, urges his party to look to the Guardian for inspiration, but why not? As a lifelong campaigner against all the social damage done by the Tories down the years, it would be churlish not to rejoice if they are now using leaves out of my book, instead of Winston Churchill's. If David Cameron takes up the Clark report, this would mark a breakthrough.
Tories would stop pretending that wealth trickles down from the top. They would never again claim that a rising economic tide lifts all boats. It means confessing that no crumbs fell from the rich man's table during the disastrous 1980s and 1990s. In 1979 14% of children lived below the poverty line: that rose to 33% by 1996. By denying that this yawning gap mattered, the Thatcher years sent a century of social progress into reverse.
When David Cameron speaks on poverty on Friday his advisers say he will accept much of Clark's analysis of Margaret Thatcher's policies: "Ignoring the reality of relative poverty was a terrible mistake." The Churchillian idea that all the state need do is provide a basic safety net to stop the poor starving is over. Poverty is measured internationally in relative terms, because that is how people feel it. To be poor is to fall too far behind what most ordinary people have in your own society.
Greg Clark quotes an analogy from my book Hard Work - Life in Low Pay Britain. I described society as a caravan moving across the desert. All may move forward, but how far behind do the poor at the back have to fall before they cease to be part of the same caravan at all? Political parties will differ on how far that stretch can be - but at least now they agree all must travel at the same speed to stay within the same society.
Relative poverty has been a hard message to get across - so will the Tories now do some of the heavy lifting in engaging voters with the problem? Asked cold, the public tend to think a number of contradictory things. They think the out-of-control greed at the top is obscene. They think the gap between rich and poor is far too great. But the Fabian Commission on Life Chances focus group of middling waverers found at first most people don't think there is real poverty. Then they think it the fault of the poor themselves - feckless, addicts or scroungers. If they have a phone and a TV, is that really poor?
But presented with facts about poor children having so much less than ordinary children like their own, they changed their minds. When they considered the quarter of children with no summer holidays, no money to go swimming, to have a birthday party or a sleepover or to take school trips, let alone own a computer or a mobile phone, they thought it unjust. They thought it wrong that children avoid teachers asking what they did in the holidays, avoid collections of money, avoid PE for lack of the right games kit. They understood the pain of being at the bottom of the pecking order from day one at school. Relative poverty is a dry phrase - but make it real and people feel for children born with their noses pressed up against the window of a society.
If now the Tories say that degrees of inequality matter, then public attitudes can change. Labour may dare to use the I word - inequality. So far they tend to describe poverty as difficult families: simply connect them to the jobs market and little else need change. By stealth Labour has done much more than that with 700,000 children lifted above the line, most estates and schools much improved, generous tax credits and programmes like Sure Start transforming lives. But Labour has done little to change voters' attitudes.
On climate change Cameron challenged Labour to be braver: now he makes it easier for Labour to be bold on poverty, too, to hit that target to abolish child poverty by 2020. The Tories promise a poverty target too: Greg Clark makes it harder by championing those without children also left behind. Don't worry, the battleground remains as clearly defined as ever between the parties - but the territory is moving leftwards as Clark urges, "Poverty is too important an issue to leave to the Labour party."
Cameron may fall to earth if he fails to devise costed policies that match his rhetoric. It stretches credulity to imagine he can divert more money to the poor than Labour, while promising to shrink the state and cut spending as a proportion of GDP. Cameron's advisers say his speech will stress it is "not just money", but marriage and education, "not just redistribution" but delving into the "social factors" that create poverty. As ever, he will imply that the voluntary sector and social enterprise can magic up the cash to fill this gaping hole.
No one could accuse Labour of neglecting the social causes: they too are good at a Victorian-style blaming of the poor. Parenting courses (disgracefully mocked by the know-nothing Tory press) are popular and they do work - but when presented this week by Blair and Reid, the subtext is that the poor need to shape up. But here the opportunity for Labour is to stop appeasing old Tory sentiments and say outright that gross inequality itself is a key reason why Britain suffers so much social dysfunction.
What would it take to cut relative poverty? Most of the poor are in work, so first they need a minimum wage families can live on: if you eat in a restaurant where the dish washers can't support their children, then the price of the meal is too low. That means we all need to pay more for our services to pay living wages. Will the Tories accept that?
It needs higher tax credits and benefits too. Then it might mean giving everyone as a right their own home, once they have money to pay for the upkeep: that gives freedom and assets to borrow against for their children. However it's done, narrowing the gap must mean telling the well-off that their growth in earnings over the next years should be slowed and the money diverted so the rest can catch up. Otherwise the caravan breaks in two.
The only countries to more or less abolish poverty are the Nordics, where incomes are much flatter, taxes are high and everyone gets excellent services (even when their conservative parties are in power). It looks politically improbable here, but if Cameron really was ready to face down his own CBI, the Mail and the Telegraph, and their daily shrieks of "Tax burdens!", it could be done. So let's see if this pig flies.