THE term of the moment is "cross-dressing".

The election, so they say, has become like a bizarre costume ball. There are Tories got up like careless Labour spendthrifts and Labour types turning out in the hair shirts of fiscal conservatism. Apparently, it's all very confusing.

One side produces £8 billion for the NHS as though from a back pocket; the other, suddenly preaching virtue, complains that there are £25 billion in "unfunded spending commitments" floating around. In this script, Labour have become the puritanical Roundheads of new model government. The Tories, boasting that everything is under control, are cavalier with the cash.

All of this is fun, in its way, for those condemned to follow the campaigns, but a little way short of the truth. Amid the bluff and bluster, the two contenders for office are still signed up to a cap on benefits spending. Both have dedicated themselves to deficit reduction programmes that are savagely austere. Once the campaign carnival has passed, the real price of your vote will become very clear.

For now, nevertheless, it is obvious that David Cameron's Conservatives have been thinking hard about the auction. Evidently, things in their campaign have not been going too well. Accusing Ed Miliband of being a backstabbing cad unfit to have charge of defence was a nuclear device that blew up in their faces. The attempt to defend non-doms was as ugly a piece of rich man's politics as anyone could imagine. Cameron's old mission to "detoxify the brand", give a thought for the environment and make hoodies huggable, was gone for good.

So he accepted his fate. With signs that the Tories were slipping in the polls, their leader retreated to the dusty old vault where the blueprints for victories past are stored. The filing cabinet labelled "Thatcher, M: For Emergency Use Only" was the one he sought. It gave off a strange odour and glowed faintly in the gloom, but needs must. Somewhere inside was the treasure map where X marked the spot. There, the hearts and minds of Middle England lay.

By the time he came to launch his manifesto last Tuesday, Cameron had his script committed to memory. Optimism was the key. Happy days were (almost) here again. Sunlit uplands full of contented people living "the good life" lay ahead. The trick was to pretend that the need for austerity, his unrelenting theme for five long years, had suddenly disappeared. Like Thatcher before him, Cameron could find money enough in a good cause. His cause, it so happened.

The retreat into rank populism on Tuesday was proof, if you really needed any, that the Tories revert to type as fast as threatened wildebeest obeying the fight-or-flight response. They run for cover behind old rhetoric and old solutions. Shame, such as it was, is banished. They run to mother. What, they ask themselves, would Margaret have done in Cameron's situation?

Patriotism, for starters. He laid that on thick in his Swindon speech, barely restraining himself from saying what he believes: a vote for the Conservatives is a vote for Britain. A vote for his Britain, at any rate. When he got to the second phase of Thatcherism Redux it became clear, once again, that Cameron's mental map of these islands is a peculiar, distended thing.

But there it was: cheap housing and a nice little property boom for anyone who might put a cross alongside the name of a Tory candidate. To these add tax reforms that will do a great deal for those who need them least and not so much - in fact, hardly anything - for those on poverty wages. A mere detail. The subsidised houses, a very strange advert for the unfettered free market and social mobility, were the key.

As every specialist has pointed out, the scheme is a nonsense. Giving discounts of up to 70% to perhaps 1.3 million English families will do nothing for the 4.7 million households dependent on social housing. Inevitably, it will reduce the stock. It won't help those who rent privately - another 4 million or so - and it could cost up to £5.8 billion a year, at least according to the National Housing Association, as compensation is paid to housing associations forced to sell properties on the cheap. Even the CBI, reliable friend to the Tory Party, denounces the scheme.

The idea, such as it is, is for councils to sell their best houses and replace these with "affordable housing". The proceeds would also fund housing association discounts, pay for the replenishment of that stock, and provide for a £1 billion scheme to recover brownfield sites. If you believe the Conservatives - and no-one does - some £4.5 billion a year will be realised.

Cameron delivered this news with the air of a man released from a self-imposed vow. No longer did he have to talk of austerity and rigour, of economic control and financial necessity. Suddenly he was a man with a magic wallet. He was also free to use the old, comforting Thatcherite rhetoric. Here was the "right" to buy, the restoration of the property-owning democracy. And the makings of one of those little booms that never, ever go wrong.

It won't happen in Scotland. In fact, the right to buy for council and housing association tenants ends here on the first day of August 2016. The Tories alone tried to stop the bill as it was going through the Edinburgh Parliament. Everyone else knew the facts. Since Thatcher introduced right-to-buy in 1980, close to half a million tenants have taken advantage. By last summer, the results were plain: 185,000 people on waiting lists with only 54,600 properties becoming available annually. And with each sale, the gulf was widening.

All of this was predicted when Thatcher was in power, but she took no more interest than Cameron is taking today. In the 1980s, in fact, Tories such as Michael Forsyth told themselves that if Scots could only be given the pride of ownership they might stop voting Labour. What with one thing and another, the problem is a little different today, but since Cameron harbours few hopes of winning support in Scotland it hardly matters.

Right-to-buy in England, looting the housing associations, is both shameless and, by its lights, smart. Who turns down a 70% discount, a guarantee of a profit, and a guaranteed roof over their head? Half a million Scots did not reject the bargain. As the Daily Mail has delighted in pointing out, Nicola Sturgeon's parents were among them. But loyalty was not bought and the policy did not become sane just because it was popular. Unlike common sense, free money does not go out of fashion.

Cameron's brief struggle to be his own kind of Tory is over now. He has tasted the drug. He lacks the armed forces that would make a handy little war feasible, but Thatcher's example has given him an inspiration. All that stuff about "the British people" is neither here nor there. The illusion of prosperity for those who might vote Conservative is all that matters. And in this Britain, as everyone knows, the illusion is built from bricks, mortar and funny money.