The trouble with Kinnock, they will say, was that he was a Welsh windbag and that no one could see him as prime minister; and the trouble with Ed Miliband is that he is vaguely geeky and nerdy, and no one can see him as prime minister, and I suppose that may be true as far as it goes.

But this is about much more than image. The problem with Ed — and his similarity with Kinnock — is far more fundamental than that. Neil Kinnock didn’t lose because he was a Welsh windbag, but because he didn’t match the Tories in coming up with a language of opportunity and aspiration. He failed to equal Margaret Thatcher and, in the end, John Major, in providing a sense of how he, Kinnock, would unleash the talents of the British people and get the economy moving.

He was brilliant at sticking up for those who needed help — the elderly, the sick, the poor. But he never showed any real acknowledgment or understanding that we live in a broadly capitalist and free-market economy. At no stage did he seem to accept that it is always this money — the tax revenues – created by this capitalist system that allows us to finance all the social benefits and protections that government is able to disburse.

Neil Kinnock failed because he made his pitch to the Labour base — the unions, the public sector and all their clients; he had absolutely nothing to say about enterprise and ambition. The man who changed all that, and who understood how Labour could win was, of course, Tony Blair; and it was Blair who made a break so decisive with the legacy of Kinnock that they actually re-baptised the party, and called it “New Labour”; and the whole point of New Labour was that it straddled the divide.

You could, of course, vote for New Labour if you had a social conscience. But you could also vote for New Labour if you had a social conscience and you wanted to get rich. People felt under Blair that Labour was emotionally and psychologically reconciled to the realities of free-market economics. They looked at old Tony, with his zillionaire friends and his love of tennis and his ever-expanding property portfolio — and they thought: this man is not hostile to business.

They could see that he was in favour of wealth creation — and the problem with Ed Miliband is that he sends out absolutely no such signal because it is just not part of his political make-up. He can’t help it. He is the product of a world of north London intellectuals and grew up in a household where the words “free market” or “capitalism” were positively terms of abuse. His problem is not any supposed geekishness or nerdiness; his problem is entirely to do with substance, not style.

Under Ed Miliband, Labour has offered no explanation whatever of how it would like to inject more dynamism and growth into British capitalism. It has nothing to say about the everyday problems of business, about high tax and regulation; and as the election approaches it will pay an ever bigger price for its failure to offer any improvement in our relations with the EU in the form of a renegotiation, let alone a referendum.

Labour has nothing to say about Britain’s ability to compete in what David Cameron rightly says is the global race. Of course, we want a society where we care actively for the vulnerable; but the reason young people are not much turned on by Labour is that it is saying nothing exciting or hopeful, let alone about starting your own business or getting on in the world, and that is because in his heart Ed Miliband does not really view those prospects with excitement or hope.

They are not why he came into politics. He is there to curb the free market, not to celebrate what it can achieve. He has reduced Labour to its old role as a party of protest, complaint, and public-sector special interest groups.

That is not how Tony Blair won three elections. It is how Neil Kinnock lost twice.

Some of this applies to Andrew Feldman, whose sole qualification to work at (let alone chair) Conservative HQ appears to be that he played tennis with the Prime Minister while both men were undergraduates at Brasenose College, Oxford, in the Eighties. However, the party co-chairman is not just a crony. He is also a key link between the Prime Minister and Conservative Party donors (I would imagine his fingers are all over the knighthood awarded to Sir Michael Hintze, a hedge-fund manager who has given more than £1.5 million, for “services to the arts” in this week’s birthday honours).

Recently Andrew Feldman was accused of calling Tory activists “swivel-eyed loons”. He has denied doing so, unconvincingly. I have no doubt, having consulted relevant sources, that the remarks made were actually his. It comes as no surprise that a Tory party chairman whose real constituency is not the Tory membership but wealthy donors should have expressed such sentiments.

But he is the least of Mr Shapps’s numerous problems. The Tory chairman also has to cope with George Osborne. Though officially Chancellor of the Exchequer, in practice Mr Osborne spends a great deal of his time overseeing Tory politics, attending many of the relevant meetings. The lurking presence of the Chancellor is the main reason why Mr Shapps has no authority.

Mr Osborne’s main channel of influence is through Stephen Gilbert, the prime minister’s political secretary. Mr Gilbert (seen internally as a far more important figure than Grant Shapps) is also, in effect, head of campaigns at Central Office. It is conceivable that Mr Gilbert might do one of these jobs well. It can be said with certainty that he does both badly.

One of the functions of the political secretary (one done well by Jonathan Hill, now Leader of the Lords, during the Major premiership, or Sally Morgan for Tony Blair) is to establish a passage between the prime minister and the parliamentary party. At times this is close to a full-time job. Unfortunately Stephen Gilbert can only devote a small amount to this because of his other responsibilities, one of the main reasons for the catastrophic disconnection between David Cameron and his Tory MPs.

The campaigning situation is yet worse. Back-bench MPs complain about poor briefing and lack of strategic direction, a problem that was glaringly obvious during the Eastleigh by-election, when it was never clear who was in charge. The hapless Mr Shapps could do nothing about this shambles, even if he wanted to, because while he occupies high office he is not permitted to exercise real power.

There is also Lynton Crosby, recently appointed political strategist to the Prime Minister. There are conflicting views of Mr Crosby, but almost everyone agrees that he gives focused and tough advice. However he is at the moment part-time, which means that nobody reports to him and he is not part of the command structure.

To sum up: Conservative organisation is a mess of special agendas, secret influence, and back-channels of communication. Contempt for traditional party structures is complete, meaning that conflicting messages and operational incompetence have become the hallmark of the Tory machine. One MP told me so many people carried out the role of chairman that “if one of them won’t do what I want, I go and ask another”. As a result the superb work which is being carried out by many ministers is hardly recognised, while the relationship between Downing Street and Tory back-benchers and activists is the worst I can remember.

The underlying responsibility for this shambles must lie at the door of David Cameron. From the very start he and (in particular) George Osborne have shown a point-blank refusal to relinquish control of party organisation, which explains why no Tory chairman has been able to make a mark. It is very hard to see how the 2015 general election could be won in these circumstances.

There is a very obvious solution, but it would require courage. Mr Cameron could bring in a heavyweight politician – his own Patten or Thorneycroft – with the vision and substance to shape his own election-winning machine. Such a character would, however, have to be given overall control. He or she could not be second-guessed by Downing Street.

There are three candidates: William Hague, Michael Gove and Boris Johnson. Mr Hague, I am told, shudders at the thought of returning to the boredom, squalor and anxiety of domestic politics. Mr Gove cannot be spared from education. It is hard to think of any modern Conservative better suited for the job than Mr Johnson. Popular with the public, loved by the party, he has reinvented the rules of political discourse since becoming Mayor of London.

So far he has been kept at arm’s length by the Tory leadership, who feel envious and threatened by the Mayor’s charm and ease. The most intelligent reaction is to tie Mr Johnson in – by making his fortunes dependent on those of Mr Cameron. Both men come, after all, from the same stable: socially and economically liberal, defiantly optimistic. There is an inevitability that, over time, Mr Johnson would use his position to mount a challenge for the leadership. But the immediate task is to win the general election, and Mr Johnson is the only Conservative with the proven capacity to do just that.

“This has now been going on for nearly two-and-a-half years. We really shouldn’t be in the business of ruling out any options.

“There are no palatable options, I want to be clear with the whole country about that.”

David Cameron faces growing political opposition at home amid suggestions that he is in favour of joining the Americans in helping to assist rebels. He has been warned that he could be defeated in the Commons if he tries to win a parliamentary agreement for Britain to arm the rebels.

Mr Cameron clashed with the Russian president at a Downing Street press conference on Sunday.

Asked by reporters whether he had “blood on his hands” for arming the Assad regime, Mr Putin said that his nation had acted in accordance with international law by delivering arms to the Syrian government.

He added: “I believe you will not deny the fact that one should hardly back those who kill their enemies and eat their organs – all that is filmed. Do you want to support these people? Do you want to supply arms to these people?”

The Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg also cautioned Mr Cameron against arming the Free Syrian Army, saying that if it were a good idea, Britain would have done it already. The former head of the Army, Lord Dannatt, said he feared any such assistance would lead Britain into further intervention, while the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, urged Mr Cameron to “tread very warily”.

In a round of TV interviews at Lough Erne, Mr Cameron said: “Let’s be clear – I am as worried as anybody else about elements of the Syrian opposition, who are extremists, who support terrorism and who are a great danger to our world.

“The question is what do we do about it? My argument is that we shouldn’t accept that the only alternative to Assad is terrorism and violence.

“We should be on the side of Syrians who want a democratic and peaceful future for their country and one without the man who is currently using chemical weapons against them.

“What we can try and do here at the G8 is have further pressure for the peace conference and the transition that is needed to bring this conflict to an end.”

The Prime Minister added: “We haven’t made a decision to give any arms to the Syrian opposition but what we do need to do is bring about this peace conference and this transition, so that people in Syria can have a government that represents them, rather than a government that’s trying to butcher them.

“What we are doing right now is helping the official Syrian opposition – people who have signed up to democracy and human rights, who want that sort of future for Syria.

“We are advising them, helping them and we are assisting them – and we should.

“President Assad wants us to think that the only alternative to him is extremism and violence. Yet there are millions of people in Syria who want a peaceful and democratic future. We should be on their side.”

Clip courtesy of Today on BBC Radio 4, the full interview is available to listen to on the BBC’s iPlayer.

Odious, twisted, hate-filled thugs; arrogant and inadequate creeps, intoxicated by the pathetic illusion of power that comes with guns; poisoned by a perversion of religion into a contempt for all norms of civilised behaviour.

They are fighting not for freedom but for a terrifying Islamic state in which they would have the whip hand — and yet there is no dodging or fudging the matter: these are among the Syrian rebels who are hoping now to benefit from the flow of Western arms.

How is it supposed to work? How are we meant to furnish machine guns and anti-tank weapons to one set of opposition forces, without them ending up in the hands of men like the al-Qaeda-affiliated thugs who executed a child for telling a joke? The answer is that we have no means of preventing such a disaster, any more than we can control what kind of “government” the rebels — if they were successful — would form in Damascus.

What is happening in Syria is one of the greatest human and cultural catastrophes of our age. For two years the mortar rounds have been pulverising the cradle of civilisation. When I think of the happy days I have spent roaming the souk of Aleppo or the Umayyad mosque of Damascus, I am filled with grief, and I hear such awful tales of destruction that I almost dread to go back. The dead are said to number 93,000 just in the past two years. But what else could we possibly have done?

Perhaps if we had piled in with the rebels at the beginning, it might have been possible to topple Bashar al-Assad and his nightmare regime. Perhaps we could have installed some sort of pluralist and democratic government, before the Syrian opposition became contaminated with jihadis.

You only have to raise that option to see that it was never on the cards — not after Iraq. We know what happens when you topple the regime of a Ba’athist strongman. You expose the fault lines of a state that was invented, in 1916, by the British colonial office, and you unleash an unbearable cycle of sectarian violence.

No one was going for a military option in 2011, certainly not the White House. With dozens of people being murdered every day in Iraq, no one was calling for us to repeat the experiment. So we sat back, without a strategy, hoping vaguely for the best — and now we have the worst of all worlds. The Assad regime has suffered all kinds of defeat and humiliation, but it has not yet lost.

Indeed, it has just recaptured the strategically important town of Qusayr, with the help of Hizbollah. We are now on the verge of a disastrous escalation, in which Syria becomes the centre of a regional if not a global power struggle.

On one side we have the rebels, including al-Qaeda, and they seem to have support — to a greater or lesser degree — from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United States, the European Union and an assortment of extraordinarily unpleasant fundamentalist preachers who are very keen on establishing an Islamic state.

On the other side we have the Assad regime, and they have the support of Lebanon’s Hizbollah militia, Iran and Russia, which has always regarded Syria as part of the Russian sphere of influence. Both sides are now symmetrically raising the stakes. The EU has decided to lift the arms embargo that has been in place since May 2011; the Iranians are now threatening to send in 4,000 troops.

Surely to goodness it is time to recognise that no one can win this conflict, because it has become at least partly a religious conflict, between Sunni and Shia. No one can win that conflict because it is almost beyond reason. It is an argument about the protocol that surrounded the succession of the Prophet Mohammed — in the seventh century AD! One side or the other might technically “win”, and impose a government over the whole country. But unless that government has the approval of both Sunnis and Shias, we are doomed to sectarian violence and reprisals forever.

This is not the moment to send more arms. This is the moment for a total ceasefire, an end to the madness. It is time for the US, Russia, the EU, Turkey, Iran, Saudi and all the players to convene an intergovernmental conference to try to halt the carnage. We can’t use Syria as an arena for geopolitical point-scoring or muscle-flexing, and we won’t get a ceasefire by pressing weapons into the hands of maniacs.

The Hillary Step is so congested that they are thinking of installing a ladder. In fact, there are so many octogenarians climbing Everest to raise money for the church roof that they might as well fit one of those chair-lifts you see in colour supplements.

As a monument to derring-do, Everest no longer qualifies; so what does that leave? We have plumbed the sea; we have probed the darkest recesses of the rainforest; we have circumnavigated the globe – even now there are probably gap yah students criss-crossing the oceans blindfolded in a pedalo to raise money for some good cause or other.

Perhaps we should make sure a Briton is on the next trip to Mars (and perhaps we could all club together to sponsor Ed Balls). Or instead, perhaps we should concentrate on the amazing things we are already doing, and that we hardly even notice – things right under our feet.

Last week I went to see the Crossrail excavations at Canary Wharf, four years after we had officially got them going, and I remembered how fragile the project had seemed. There was a time when we had to fight for Crossrail, when senior cabinet ministers were denouncing it as a mad plan to build a pointless trench across London. It was an easy way to save £16 billion, they said. Axe it now, they said, and no one will even miss it.

Well, thank heavens we didn’t listen to that guff. Crossrail’s tunnel is now a giant and growing fact, that will revolutionise east-west transit in the greatest city on earth, pinging you from Heathrow to the City in about half an hour. Its fast air-conditioned network will run from Maidenhead in the west to Shenfield in the east.

Crossrail will increase London’s rail capacity by about 10 per cent, and generate an estimated £42 billion worth of growth across the country. Even in its construction phase, Crossrail is good for the whole of Britain. Of its 1,600 contracts, 62 per cent have gone to firms outside London – more than half of them small and medium enterprises (SMEs). There are bridges from Shropshire, cranes from Derbyshire, grouting from Coventry, piling from Oldham, lifts from Preston and vast quantities of lubrication from Bournemouth.

The project is responsible for about 55,000 jobs across the country, and it would have been utter insanity to cancel it – not just because of the jobs it creates, but because it is essential if we are to cope with the demands on our transport network.

London will have a million more people in the next 10 years, and without Crossrail the Central line would become so packed and overheated that it would not be fit, under EU rules, for the transport of live animals. It is a vivid and powerful lesson in the vital importance of investing in transport infrastructure, and of driving on ruthlessly with essential schemes: the

Tube upgrades, new river crossings, Crossrail Two, and others. They are not just good for London, but for the whole of Britain.

And yet none of these Crossrail statistics do justice to what is being achieved. When Patrick McLoughlin, the Secretary of State for Transport, and I went into the new station box at Canary Wharf, I felt a sense of primeval awe, like a Neanderthal stumbling into the gloom of Lascaux. It is akin to a gigantic subterranean cathedral several times the size of Chartres. The boring machine is like a colossal steel-toothed remora or lamprey, grinding her way through the clay.

I stood beneath her jaws, and fingered some of that thick black Bournemouth lube, and they told me how the machine had driven with such accuracy that when she entered the station box she was only 5mm off target. This is the biggest engineering project in Europe, an amazing advertisement for British construction; and when you look at it you wonder why we are sometimes so prone to self-doubt.

When the next coronation rolls round, we won’t need a new mountain to climb. We’ll have the joy and excitement of Crossrail Two, as she chomps her way from Hackney to Chelsea; and unlike climbing Everest, the scheme will be of practical benefit to all.

In the meantime, we need a proper name for Crossrail, the vast new line on London’s underground network – and who better to give her name to that line than someone who has served her country so unfailingly and well for 60 years?