Do they think we were born yesterday? ''Read my lips,'' said Michael Portillo on BBC TV yesterday after his Bournemouth conference speech. ''The Conservatives will spend more every year than Labour has spent in any year.''

More on health, more on pensions, more on education. But they will also ''let people keep more of the money they've earned'', so there will also be cuts in income tax, business taxes, and fuel duty; tax breaks to savers and people taking out private health insurance; and a restoration of the married couple's allowance.

Yes: Vote Tory, And Spend More Than The Country Can Afford.

This is even more loopy than the Tories' now-abandoned tax guarantee, which promised to cut the share of national income taken in tax over the lifetime of the next Tory Government. Michael Portillo didn't want that millstone around his neck, so he's fashioned another one.

Labour has been left speechless by the sheer audacity of it. It would never have dared to promise to spend more and tax less, without giving any idea of how it would make the public finances add up. Either the Tories have already given up on winning the next election, or else they think the voters have lost their marbles. Was this new economic policy tried

out on the focus groups before hitting

the conference stage? If so, did they

swallow it?

It sounds like an attempt to turn the economics of the fuel protests into a programme for government.

Perhaps the Conservatives think that it is no longer necessary to present any kind of credible and costed programme for government; that they can ride back to government on a wave of anti-Labour

sentiment so intense that the voters will believe anything. Perhaps they think that, since no-one believes a word any politician says, they might as well say anything they like.

Ken Clarke, the former Tory Chancellor - who should know better - tried to defend the policy by presenting it as a kind of accountancy sleight of hand.

''Look,'' he said, ''the economy's doing pretty well, delivering a lot more tax

revenue than anyone expected, and if Gordon has a war chest, why shouldn't we?'' Labour has already planned a massive increase in spending, so all the Tories need to do is follow Gordon Brown, keep to these spending figures, and by definition they'd be spending more than Labour is spending today.

But we know that's not what Michael Portillo means at all.

He wants us to believe that the Conservatives are no longer the party of the small state, of rolling back public spending, of caps and cuts, but have somehow become converted in Opposition to maintaining and improving state provision. He wants us to believe that the NHS means as much to the Tories as it means to Labour; that a Tory Chancellor would be as committed to rebuilding Britain's decrepit public services as Gordon Brown.

But it betrays a profound cynicism about what the voting public will believe. Has British politics really descended to this - a kind of slap-happy Dutch auction where anything goes?

Thanks to Portillonomics, you can have it all: lower taxes, cheaper petrol, higher pensions, better hospitals and schools. Anything they can do, we can do better. Just think of a number and double it.

Except for the catch. The small print. The get-out clause in the endowment policy you don't hear about until the letter arrives saying it won't pay the mortgage.

For, of course, Michael Portillo does have a way of making the numbers work: by enlisting the private sector.

The way the Shadow Chancellor presented this yesterday was very interesting. He said the Tories were going to ''break down the Berlin Wall'' in the NHS which is keeping private money out.

He wants a ''partnership'' between

Bupa and the State. ''As a nation we

spend too little money on health'' (well, he got that bit right). But the solution is not to spend more money on health - as Labour is doing - but to allow more

people to go private. ''If people want to provide for themselves, let them provide for themselves.''

The Conservatives will encourage

people to take out private health insurance by giving them, and their employers, tax concessions to do so. This is how they intend to ''outspend'' Labour on health. They point out that most European countries already have mixed systems where care is part-private, part-state. They also say that a majority of people in Britain expect to have to go private.

Well, they may like the idea of

a better NHS, but they might baulk at paying up to #70 a week to take out a private health policy. Especially when they discover that it doesn't cover acute surgery, for which they are handed back to the State. In America, if you aren't covered, you don't get treated - it's as simple as that. They won't exactly leave you dying in a gutter, but they will check your credit card on the way to the operating theatre, and you can forget elective surgery if you aren't insured. Yet America spends more than twice as much as Britain as a percentage of GDP.

We spend less than any country in Europe on health and, in sheer cost terms, the NHS is a fantastic achievement.

To get comprehensive care for so little outlay (6.8% of GDP) is an astonishing feat. But you get what you pay for:

out-of-date equipment, dirty hospitals, and waiting lists.

The Tories are building their policy on despair at the state of the NHS.

Three years after Labour took over, and waiting lists are still too long, there are too few beds, and the hospitals are a war zone. People believed that Labour was serious about restoring the NHS, now they're not so sure. There has been a huge increase in the number of patients going private in the past 18 months as a result of this crisis of faith.

Well, Labour is pledged now to increase spending year on year by 6% until spending reaches European levels. Gordon Brown has left it desperately late, but I still believe that people will choose Labour's spending promise against the Tories. Britain is not ready for a two-tier health service.

And they know that you can't get

anything for nothing.