Cameron tries to build some Bridges

PITY George Bridges. He has had a successful and varied career, is in good health, is well liked by his peers and grudgingly respected by his enemies. But whatever good fortune has visited him so far will soon be replaced by the thankless misery his new job will bring. He just has been appointed the Conservative campaign director for Scotland and north England.

This is comparable to being made head of water supply in the Sahara desert or organiser of a Saudi beer festival. He must harvest where there are no seeds and will have to answer to his bosses for the lack of crops. He is expected to succeed where Michael Forsyth, David McLetchie and Sir Malcolm Rifkind have failed.

David Cameron may boast about the "Scottish blood running through my veins" but the Notting Hill set view the land north of Hadrian's Wall with the same feared bewilderment as the early Romans. They are aware of the Tory wipeout in the 1997 general election, but still blanche when they learn that voting levels have fallen even since then. Previous leaders didn't even think about it: but Cameron wants to take Scotland and the north of England head on.

His other tasks are going well. Relations with the London media are good and his environmental message - which is to be his trademark - is well understood if not universally approved of. Nor need he waste his time attacking Labour, especially now John Prescott is doing such a fine job dragging the name of his own party through the mud.

Every extra day he stays as Deputy Prime Minister, permanent damage is being wreaked on the Labour brand. If Mr Cameron was very lucky, he could find a way to caricature the party as corrupt, arrogant and incompetent. But in Mr Prescott he has someone who embodies all three vices, and projects them in a way the electorate can understand all too clearly. For as long as he remains in office, the Tories need not worry about attacking Labour.

What they do need to worry about is the lack of any demonstrable appetite for Cameron and his policies north of Manchester. Yet the Conservatives are mildly optimistic. Their research shows people like Mr Cameron in Scotland as much as London - it's just that they're not sure about the Conservatives. Explain that the party's okay, and they can be brought round. The seeds are there, party chairman Francis Maude believes, but the land north of the Border needs to be tilled.

I once saw the Conservatives' battle map of "no-vote territory" (as one shadow cabinet member describes the half of Britain which lies north of Manchester). It is colour coded, using information from a junk mail computer which seeks to identify likely Tory areas by their shopping habits. It went entirely blank after the Scottish border, in the way that early 18th-century maps of Africa were blank in the middle.

That was apparently because Scotland fights its own battles and Mr Bridges is likely to have a minimal role in the 2007 Holyrood election campaign save to try and gather some intelligence for Cameron HQ. There are Scottish Tories around him, but they are the likes of Liam Fox and Eleanor Laing who have been granted political asylum in safe English seats. Mr Cameron needs to understand Scotland before he can work out how many votes he's likely to secure.

Part of this dire communication problem is because the Tories in Scotland and England are two separate parties, united only by a common leader. While Labour and the Liberal Democrats have an integrated structure, the Tory party could split in two tomorrow - just as it was before 1965 with the Scottish Unionist Party working alongside but separate to London. This would allow the Tories to fly the St George's Flag and exploit Gordon Brown's Scottishness at election time. With Englishness on the rise again, there's an obvious case for having two separate parties once more.

But Mr Cameron won't have it. For reasons I have not been able to fathom he and George Osborne, his friend and shadow chancellor, are passionate unionists. Certainly the Shadow Cabinet does contain little Englanders like Alan Duncan, who last weekend suggested a Scot could not become Prime Minister. But Mr Cameron seems to have a faith that Scotland will come back to the Tories - which is why he has dispatched one of his most trusted lieutenants to the job.

The Tory pulse in Scotland is beating more strongly than its MP headcount suggests. The party secured 16% of the vote last year, but picked up just one seat. It had a similar result in north-east England. When you pick up a fifth of the votes, there are no seats to be had in the Westminster system. The trick is to find a Tory message which appeals to the more deprived areas of Britain.

Much of the middle class, in England and Scotland, vote Labour out of a misplaced idea that this will help the poor. It is seen almost as a charity vote: this may cost me money in extra tax, but it's for the best. Several council schemes stand in heartbreaking testimony to the old mantra - when Labour fights poverty, poverty wins. Mr Cameron's opportunity is to come up with a better agenda.

The tools may come from the unlikely laboratory of Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader whose Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) is now doing superb work on inner-city poverty. It started when he visited east Glasgow while leader and was stunned to see the conditions people live in. He called it then the Easterhouse agenda.

The CSJ is spoken of excitedly by almost everyone on the Tory front bench and with good reason. It has shown how empowering people, rather than handing them welfare cheques, is the solution. The project is still unfinished, but is arguably the most promising idea coming out of the Conservative thinking at present.

To his credit, Mr Cameron has realised that his fix-a-windmill-on-your-roof brand of Conservatism may work well in certain London circles but has limited resonance outside the capital. Mr Bridges has been dispatched to find a new approach. If his party coins and adopts a new method of fighting poverty, it may finally earn a hearing in Scotland.

• Fraser Nelson is political editor of The Spectator