Talk about open goals. David Cameron has been handed the easiest job in politics this week in Bournemouth as he makes his first annual conference address to the Conservatives as their leader. All he needs to do is stand there, smile and sound reasonably sane. The public can do the rest.

Manchester was a freak show, a horror story. Gordon Brown, cast as the evil plotter, with his “psychological flaws”. John Prescott, the Les Dawson of British politics, apologising to everyone except his wife for his trouser-dropping and cowboy antics. John Reid, the thug’s thug, setting his jaw for a square go with anyone who wants a piece of it.

Labour ministers were congratulating themselves on the success of their conference. Can’t think why. The party has destroyed its reputation for discipline, unity and responsible leadership. We’ve seen it driven mad by seething rivalries and animosity, presided over by a charismatic crowd-pleaser who can’t let go.

If Tony Blair had wanted to help Cameron on his way to Number 10, he couldn’t have done better. The prime minister delivered a tear-stained farewell – only to reveal he’s staying on because he can’t trust his likely successor. His wife reportedly called Brown a liar.

There will be months more of this uncertainty, backbiting, plotting and snide asides before Blair finally goes. It is an impossible situation, a purgatory. Is Blair going to give another tearful farewell to the Scottish Labour conference? And then another to the spring conference? And when he finally goes?

And what of the Scottish elections in May? They will be against a background of division and confusion as the old regime tries to ensure the new regime sticks to the script written by Tony Blair in his departure address. There will be no “Brown bounce” because the Blairites have resolved to destroy the chancellor’s image. They have fed public perceptions of Brown as a grim and humourless back-stabber who can’t work with anyone except his Scottish cronies.

This is manna for the Tories. David Cameron will have another year to establish himself as the agreeable leader of a relatively intelligent and united political party of the centre right. Certainly, there are concerns in some opinion polls about his policies – he doesn’t really have any. He has postures instead – on the environment, on human rights, on Iraq and not being too close to the Americans. This is post-modern politics.

However, Cameron really doesn’t need to worry about policy right now. The government has been reduced to a rabble of malcontents, who no longer know which end of the political spectrum they belong to. Tony Blair has told them that they must support his discredited policies on Iraq, health, civil liberties – or he’ll make sure they lose the next election.

The thought crossed my mind that perhaps Tony Blair had become a political double agent. Having decided that Labour no longer deserved him, he’d decided to do his best to wreck the party before jumping ship to his natural home, the Conservative Party. However, we know this is fantasy because the Tory Party is now far too left-wing for Blair.

This used to be a satirical aside, but it is now plain fact. Look at what the Labour leader said about the Conservatives: he attacked Cameron for wanting to “hug” criminals, introduce a bill of rights and for having made critical remarks about American foreign policy. This was an invitation by Blair for John Reid to launch himself at the Labour leadership as the champion of the authoritarian populist right. Blair clearly doesn’t trust Brown on this agenda, and the chancellor has been largely silent on the war against terrorism and on crime.

Reid is the attack dog anointed, ready to bark the message that terrorist suspects cannot expect to be treated fairly before the law; that Muslim groups will have to be seen to toe the line; that immigrants will be second-class citizens; and criminals will face summary punishments and ever-longer sentences.

All this is from the man who spent a lost weekend with Radovan Karadzic, punched a Commons attendant who wouldn’t let him into the chamber because he was drunk; who almost came to blows with Donald Dewar at the 1999 Labour conference over his son Kevin Reid’s involvement in “Lobbygate”; and who was accused by the parliamentary standards commissioner, Elizabeth Filkin, of intimidating witnesses in a parliamentary inquiry. What a CV.

If Reid becomes prime minister, we can be sure British foreign policy will remain slavishly pro-American. Dr Reid loves a scrap; confrontation is in his nature. So, expect Britain to be at Bush’s side if and when he decides to invade Iran. Trident will of course be renewed. But once they get to know him, will the British public be prepared to have Reid’s finger on the nuclear button?

This is all doing Cameron’s job for him. It is making him sound like the embodiment of calm reason. Presenting him as a liberal has been the PR strategy of the Notting Hill Tories as they try to undo the awful image of Thatcherism and appeal to modern voters. But now Labour is the “nasty party”, sounding like Norman Tebbit – or at least one part of it is. Civil war has broken out in Labour between the social authoritarians and the social democrats; between the populist right and the reformed left.

Blairites believe Brown would be soft on crime, would distance Britain from America and would put civil liberties before the security of the citizen. The rest of the party – the vast majority – are agreed with Brown that “mistakes” were made over Iraq, that you can’t fight enemies of freedom by destroying liberty, that parliament needs to be strengthened against the government, and that – broadly speaking – the solution to crime is a fairer society.

Crime has fallen, overall, under Labour, largely thanks to the chancellor’s policies which have made work pay and created jobs. But to hear Reid and Blair talk, you would think we were in the middle of a crime wave, caused by liberal judges releasing paedophiles and terrorists to attack law-abiding citizens in their homes.

They do this because populists know crime chimes with the public. Law and order has always been an easy way to win short-term support, that’s why the Tories used to play the crime/immigration/ terrorism card. But as Michael Howard discovered in 2005, voters make a broader choice at election time, especially when the LibDem vote is added. Labour is unlearning the lessons of the last two elections.

Cameron may have lost his policies, but Labour has lost its political senses., succumbing to mad party disease, just as the Tories did after Thatcher’s fall 16 years ago. And for the first time since the early 1990s there is now a real prospect of a Conservative government.