NEARLY two years after their general election disaster and still trailing miles behind Labour in the latest opinion poll today - not even gaining from the government's "black" Christmas spate of difficulties - the Tories are plainly in need of a big new idea to appeal to the voters.

So William Hague has wedded the Conservatives to the institution of marriage and has pledged a tax and benefits system to uphold it.

But he has borrowed an old idea by returning to the back-to-basics initiative that John Major's government shelved.

However he may at last have found a key to recovery.

For though the back-to-basics campaign collapsed - under the weight of too many Tory sex scandals at the time - many ordinary people, it seems, regretted it being ditched since their concerns about the breakdown of marriage have come over loud and clear during the "listening to Britain" drive launched by Mr Hague.

And now he promises to reverse the tilting of the tax and benefits system in favour of single people and attacks the government for eating away at the married couples' allowance.

By this strategy he is, perhaps, stealing a march on Labour whose pro-family rhetoric has been balanced not only by the skewing of support away from the traditional family, but also by a faint-hearted non-judgmental families-of-all-kinds-are-equal outlook that contrasts with the new Tory positiveness.

Yet, the glaring effects in recent years - many of them of Tory rule - of the lack of moral and financial support for marriage are clear in Britain having Europe's highest divorce rate, the highest level of single mothers and of teenage pregnancies, and all the manifest social ills that go with them.

In determining to combat this, Mr Hague may begin to make headway at last.

His only concern about hoisting a moral banner need be that voters flocking to it will not go unnoticed by the opportunistically adaptable New Labour.

It does, after all, owe a lot for its strong position in the opinion polls to Tory values which it has borrowed - evidenced by Trade Minister Stephen Byers this week extolling wealth creation whereas 20 years ago a politician of his colours would be have been talking of wealth distribution.

So if Mr Hague starts to pick up points as the champion of marriage and family values, Tony Blair may soon play snap with this policy.

But either way, Britain will benefit.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.