"COME and join us," urged the Tory leader yesterday. "Come and join us in Howard's half-baked half-way house."

This is a house that is neither in nor out of Europe. It is a house that neither raises nor cuts taxes. It is a house that limits public spending but carries on spending on schools, hospitals, police, pensioners and prisons. It is a house that claims to look forward to the future but still dwells on the war. It is a house that promises nothing but pledges a great deal. And it is a house that wants to control immigration but is led by an immigrant.

Michael Howard's first speech as leader to a Conservative Party conference was low-key. It seems unlikely - unless the election is delayed - that he will get a chance to make a high-key one.

He was so often - too often - caught between two stools. He had to play to the UK Independence Party voters (and financiers) who are throttling the Tories. So he was tough on Europe, demanding whole-sale changes. There was not a single positive word, but a stream of negative sentences: he was against the constitution, against the currency, against the social chapter, against the fisheries policy.

"We need a new approach to Europe," he said, but this was the same old Tory tactic - neither in nor out - that destroyed John Major's government a decade ago.

And he never addressed the central question: if Europe is so wrong for Britain, if it needs so much reform, why does Mr Howard want to stay in? Isn't he brave enough to say he wants out?

Similarly with taxation. It is a bad thing. No one likes paying tax. But all Mr Howard will pledge to do is "stop Tony Blair's third term tax rises dead in their tracks", which means Mr Blair's 66 tax rises will be untouched by a Conservative government.

He offered only one way of reducing public spending, promising (even though he promised not to offer any promises) to save billions on waste. Will this alone do the trick? "It will put us on the path to lower taxes," he said, lodging firmly in the half-way house on a very long path.

But at the same time he was pledging to increase public spending - usually on very worthwhile projects: creating 20,000 drug rehabilitation places, employing 5,000 additional policemen a year, building more prisons, increasing pensions by £7 a week.

Mr Howard isn't the greatest public orator. He doesn't have the passion or the vision of a Tony Blair or a Gordon Brown, and he doesn't have the humour or the warmth of a William Hague.

Mr Howard did, though, finish his speech with a powerful passage about his own background, about his grandmother's death in Hitler's concentration camp and about how his refugee family was allowed into Britain.

But earlier in his speech he had spoken about the need to cap the number of immigrants allowed into Britain each year. Like the Europe question he refuses to address, he seems never to have asked himself if such a cap had existed in the 1940s and the Howard family had arrived the day after the limit had been reached, what would have become of him?

At this conference, the Conservatives have done their best to show that they are new and young. Labour under Mr Blair is part of the rock 'n roll generation that believes music is only real when it is played on vinyl records, so to make the Conservatives look modern, they've released details of the front-benchers' most recently purchased CDs.

In the quest for modernity, they've also redesigned the party's emblem, the torch. But it has now begun to resemble a Soviet Stakhanovite symbol. And then their leader ended up talking about the Second World War and the Blitz. It is a war which started 65 years ago in another century, in another life.

It was, though, an appropriate way to finish the speech because Mr Howard's is a party that is still stuck in the past, still talking about the war, still fighting the same old battles and still without a future.