When David Cameron came to give a speech to CPRE on a lovely, sunny morning in May, no one quite knew which line he was going to take.

He had steered the Conservatives to a new green agenda. He had commissioned the Quality of Life report from John Gummer and Zac Goldsmith. He had been to see melting glaciers.

He had biked to work. But doubts remained. There had been that car bringing up the rear, transporting clean white shirts for the post-shower leader.

There had been John Redwood’s report on competitiveness, which has talked about new roads, new airports and massive deregulation. There had been no visible hurry to turn Gummer’s recommendations into anything resembling Conservative policy.

When Green Alliance had scored the three main political parties on their environmental commitments in late 2007, the Tories came last.

Just before his speech, I asked him about something Oliver Letwin, the Tory policy supremo in charge of the next manifesto, had said about political attitudes to rural England.

“When communities are roused to save an endangered landscape,” Letwin countryside as it is, with its wonderful landscapes and villages, already has tremendous social value, both for those who live in it and for people in towns and cities who visit it.

Spiers said: “The protection and improvement of our green spaces for the benefit of the whole nation could be a hugely popular cause. David Cameron’s speech dealt with some very important issues. But I suspect that politicians of all parties are missing a huge trick by not tapping into people’s passionate concern about the countryside — its landscape and wildlife, as well as its social aspects.

The countryside shouldn’t dismissed as a concern of ‘middle England’, whatever that means!”

At the end of this event, there remained little clarity about what might be in a Conservative manifesto. The General Election may be two years away, and they are still only floating some soft and hazy-edged ideas. There is deep-lying tension within the party between the Gummer bike and Redwood car, a green agenda and a market-development agenda. There is a patent and very attractive desire in them for a harmonious world in which English villages happily build new affordable houses, but little engagement with the hard-edged mechanisms that will be required to make that happen. They are, in other words, still at the stage of questions, not answers.