Cameron is making the intellectual running now — with a little help from the Blairites

What do you give a Prime Minister who wants nothing? The Indian government has been asking itself this for some time, ahead of Gordon Brown’s official visit later this month. The famously frugal Prime Minister would have little interest in any trinket. Presenting him with some casual clothing could be misinterpreted as an impolite sartorial hint. So after much deliberation, Delhi University has been ordered to award Mr Brown an honorary doctorate. The chosen subject: ‘academia and public services’.

It is not yet clear whether Mr Brown will accept. The degree might invite unhelpful questions about what, precisely, he has contributed to the theory of public services. True, he stood athwart Tony Blair’s pro-market reforms and has lost little time dismantling them in office. But if he has an alternative intellectual agenda, it is one that can barely be discerned in Westminster let alone in New Delhi.

In fact, as this week’s political battles show, the intellectual running in British politics is now being made by the Conservatives. We glimpsed this last year when Alistair Darling filled his budget with Tory policies. And we have seen it yet again this week with Brown’s ‘relaunch’ amounting to little more than the regurgitation of plans for nuclear power and health screening. Mr Cameron, meanwhile, saw in the new year by announcing the most radical welfare reform proposals Britain has ever seen.

A Conservative government would end the ‘let them eat tax credits’ approach to welfare and test every single one of the 2.6 million incapacity benefit claimants to judge what work each of them is capable of doing. The Jobseekers’ Allowance would last for two years and then be replaced by Australian-style ‘work for dole’ schemes. Mr Brown is too shrewd a politician not to sense that the public mood is behind such tough-love approach.