Forget Ukip, David Cameron and explain what the Government is up to From all this, the big non sequitur is to conclude that the Conservative Party's historic error was to lurch to the centre ground and vacate the terrain now cheerfully occupied by Mr Farage. Let us first recall that the Tories fought the 2001 election on a platform of muddled skinhead conservatism and "Keep the Pound" Eurosceptic rhetoric, and campaigned in 2005 by blowing the dog whistle to signal private sympathy for the disgruntled Right. In both cases, the party was trounced. Only since embracing the centre ground have the Tories come within striking distance of an overall majority. Many Conservatives hate this and get furious when reminded of it. But it's the truth: anyone who thinks that the party will achieve an outright majority by fighting a campaign dominated by Europe, immigration and aggressive small-state conservatism hasn't paid much attention to recent political history. Or to anything else. Of course Cameron should seek to win back Ukip voters - but not by jeopardising the gains he has made in non-traditional Tory seats. Again, it is a psephological fact that the Conservatives will not win next time unless they make inroads into Labour terrain. At the last election, Ukip secured fewer than one million votes, compared to Gordon Brown's 8.6 million and Nick Clegg's 6.8 million. As a party of Right-wing protest, Mr Farage's gang does well in local and European elections. But it is no accident that they have yet to win a single seat at Westminster. The electorate understands the difference between an opinion poll response and the composition of Parliament. What about Ukip votes in marginal seats? On this, I defer to the best political scientist in Britain, Professor Tim Bale of Sussex University, who wrote recently on The Spectator's Coffee House blog that "the impact is vastly exaggerated. At best we're talking about no more than a handful of seats - certainly nowhere near enough to mean the difference between the Tories being the biggest party and a comfortable overall majority. Persuaded? You should be. In April 2006, Cameron called Ukip's members "closet racists." I doubt the PM would go so far today, not least because Mr Farage has worked hard to purge some of the nastier elements from his party's ranks. None the less, the Tory leader is right not to heed those in his party - predominantly at its grassroots - who see the Ukip surge as a terrible warning of electoral disaster ahead. It is no such thing. The Coalition's greatest defect at present is not the threat from the Eurosceptic Right (still marginal), or dissent between the two governing parties (intrinsic and unavoidable), but the disconnect between action and explanation. In its first months, the Cameron-Clegg Government was superbly effective in its communication of a difficult message - first, that painful action was required to deal with the deficit and second, that it was all Labour's fault. Since then, the Coalition has embarked upon a programme for government the radicalism of which is matched only by a collective aphasia about that programme's necessity and the fundamental objectives underpinning it. The gap between deed and word has grown dangerously wide. And to some extent, that is deliberate. "We don't trumpet everything we do," one Cabinet minister said to me recently, "because we don't want people to think it's all part of some scary ideological crusade." That would indeed be a dangerous impression for the public to form. But there is an even greater danger in silence - or, more accurately, mumbling - that allows voters and the Coalition's opponents to fill in the gaps as luridly as they please. In politics, as in life, purpose is all. Nobody understood that better than the late Labour strategist Philip Gould, whose extraordinarily moving book, When I Die: Lessons from the Death Zone, has just been published posthumously. Gould grasped that everything - even death itself - should be approached strategically. The book is inspiring in its discussion of mortality; but, like everything Gould wrote, it is also a manual for those undertaking any task, political or otherwise, and trying to make sense of it to themselves and to others. A government stands or falls on its capacity to explain that purpose, especially when it pursues austerity and makes painful demands of those it serves. The last month is not a warning to Cameron to shift trajectory. It is a warning to him that he must better explain the trajectory he is already embarked upon. The brush strokes are there but the frame is barely visible. Too many voters now look at this Coalition, so focused in its early days, and ask: why? What are they up to? What should be worrying the Prime Minister is not Ukip. It is the rest of us.