At intervals during this election campaign, David Cameron has declared that he is leading the Conservative Party on a "journey". But as he moves seemingly closer to power in these final days, one fundamental question remains unanswered: a journey from where, and to where, exactly?

On becoming leader six months after Michael Howard failed to get the Tories elected in 2005, Cameron had to do something remarkable to restore his party's popularity. So what has he done over the past four and a half years? What policy decisions has he made, in an attempt to make the Conservatives electable again? And have they worked?

On the crucial issue of the economy, this is the man who, with his shadow chancellor, George Osborne, is so wedded to the Tories' usual tax-cutting agenda that even the worst global financial crash in more than half a century did not weaken his commitment to inheritance-tax cuts for the country's richest, which would be funded by the same assault on "red tape" in the public sector advocated by Michael Howard and William Hague before him.

This is the man who, to secure the Tory leadership in 2005, went even further than his arch-Eurosceptic predecessors Howard, Hague and Iain Duncan Smith by promising to withdraw from the mainstream, centre-right poli­tical grouping in Europe and to seek out new allies on the extremist fringes of the European Parliament. To the shock of some colleagues, including those on his front bench, he fulfilled that promise with the support of Hague as shadow foreign secretary.

And this is the man who, in the eleventh hour of a floundering campaign, rediscovered his enthusiasm for emphasising a cap on immigration, a policy that he first helped devise under Howard in 2005.

Staring failure in the face

Contrary to the recriminations that have already begun on the Tory right wing, if Cameron doesn't lead his party to victory in this election, it will not be because he has changed it too much and shifted it to the left, but because he has not changed it enough and, if anything, has pushed it to the right.

Unlike his main opponent in this campaign, Gordon Brown, Cameron has been lucky. He has repeatedly been portrayed in the media as
a "moderniser" and party reformer, doing for the Tories what Neil Kinnock, Peter Mandelson, Tony Blair and Brown did for Labour.

But failure to build solid support for the Tories in the polls has cast doubt on whether this "moderniser" has done enough to deliver a clean victory, let alone the landslide that was once predicted. Indeed, after soaring leads that reached 28 per cent in 2008, it seemed by September last year that the Conservative Party wasn't polling well enough to win without a fight. And so it has proved.

In opposition, Tony Blair's New Labour barely ever fell below 40 per cent in the polls, and frequently rose above 50. In 1996, Labour came above 50 per cent in every poll carried out by Ipsos MORI, and often reached the high fifties. Over most of the past year, the Tories have languished below 40 per cent.

Having begun their campaign by talking up a certain victory, the Tories have responded to their slide in the polls with desperate warnings about the disadvantages, economic as well as political (and much disputed by independent experts), posed by a hung parliament. They
absurdly devoted a party political broadcast to the mock merits of a fictional "hung parliament party", its symbol a yellow noose, which offered "no change" in education, health and other policies.

Cameron knows that anything other than outright victory in such propitious circumstances would be a defeat for him and his party - it would be a "failure", he conceded, during a recent tour of a Coca-Cola plant in Yorkshire.

Tory backbenchers say privately that if their party does not come out on top in a hung par­liament, the "men in grey suits" will move in swiftly for the kill. "We have put up with him acting as if he is bigger than the party until now," one MP told me. "None of us wants to be blamed for any disunity. But that can and will change in a flash if he is not prime minister by the end of the week."

It makes them seem a little ungrateful. Cameron himself has consistently polled higher than his party, scoring 47 per cent on average
to the Conservatives' 40 per cent last year. He has done much, if only superficially, to "detoxify" the Tory brand: no easy task. His modern social liberalism is as unequivocal as his state-slashing free-marketeerism.

But Cameron's problem is that, by succeeding in the polls where his three most recent predecessors failed, he has revived the Tories' lethal appetite for power. Having been tantalised by the prospect of power, they now expect success.

No direction known

Labour does not - yet - have a record of dropping its leaders immediately after general election defeats. As Gordon Brown likes to remind those close to him, Clement Attlee and James Callaghan stayed on after losing (Attlee for four years after defeat in 1951, Callaghan for a year after 1979), and Harold Wilson returned to office in 1974 after losing four years earlier.

The Tories have proved far more ruthless. Think of how it all ended for their most successful prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, and the way they have disposed of three different leaders since 1997.

It is possible that the Tory leader will yet win. But he has cause to fear a hung parliament: it would put him in a very fragile position. If the Conservative Party comes first in the national vote but second in the share of seats, it will be difficult for Cameron to argue that he should
be prime minister, given that - in contrast to Brown and Nick Clegg - he has remained steadfastly opposed to any reform of the distorting first-past-the-post system.

If it turns out that Cameron is unable to form a government in the days following the election, the "journey" on which he took his party may come to an abrupt and largely unforeseen end. And then what? The Tories went for the "core vote" in 2001 and 2005. Now, they are (wrongly) seen to have "modernised".

It is hard to see where, if Cameron fails, they could turn next.