Frontline Tories to Cameron: ‘We don’t want to look nasty and we don’t want to look mad.'

Just before Easter, writing for the Times, I talked to 30 of the 40 Conservative MPs with the most marginal constituencies. My aim was to get a sense of how they think their party should position itself. I explored their opinions on a range of vexed policy areas. Finally I asked whether David Cameron’s leadership was a help or hindrance.

The broad conclusion was that most marginal MPs took a decidedly and sometimes passionately ‘softline’ position on most controversial issues, European ‘interference’ in domestic human rights questions offering the nearest thing to a hardline consensus. And all considered Mr Cameron a plus, though more weakly in the Midlands and North.

I wrote up my results in some detail, my focus being to make a factual report. But my short interviews had been real conversations rather than just box-ticking: they prompted thoughts and observations that fell outside a survey report. What were they?