Opposition leader David Cameron yesterday spelled out his "personal manifesto" for governing Britain as the general election campaign was set to start.
With commentators expecting Prime Minister Gordon Brown to call the election on Tuesday for a May 6 polling day, Conservative leader Cameron said he was gearing up for "the fight of my life".
He vowed to clean up what he called the "devastation and waste" left by Brown and 13 years of the Labour Party in office.
Writing in The Daily Telegraph newspaper, which called it his 'personal manifesto', Cameron said he wanted a state that would "crush bureaucracy" and lower taxes to fuel aspiration and wealth creation.
"These values have never been more needed as we confront the legacy of Gordon Brown: our economy wracked by debt, our social fabric torn apart and the political system mired in sleaze," he wrote.
"It is fortunate that I am an optimist as I survey the devastation and waste caused by his time in power. And I know we have the policies and ambition to get the country moving and to remould it."
Cameron said that unlike Brown's Labour predecessor Tony Blair, he would lead a "quietly effective" government which was not "obsessed" with the news cycle. He also set himself against Brown's "crude party politics".
"You will get a different style of government from me. It will be a collegiate one, where the team I appoint are trusted to get on with the job, where cross-party consensus will be sought, where decisions are based on the national interest, not the political interest," Cameron said.
He added: "I have the fight of my life on my hands and I've never been more ready for battle."
The Conservatives are ahead in the opinion polls, though on current predictions there could be a hung parliament under Britain's first-past-the-post electoral system.
A Brown ally said yesterday that the prime minister would not find it "impossible" to work with the smaller opposition Liberal Democrats in such a scenario.
"He wouldn't find that impossible, I am quite sure," former treasury minister Geoffrey Robinson told BBC radio.
He suggested that when the Cabinet agreed to offer a referendum on the alternative vote system for parliamentary elections, it might have been with one eye on wooing the Lib Dems into a coalition.
"Reading between the lines, I think that if there is a three-way split, which there could be... if they saw that, I don't see why they wouldn't," Robinson said.
Meanwhile Labour tried yesterday to counter Cameron's election pitch with a new campaign poster portraying the Tory leader as Gene Hunt, a rule-bending 1980s detective from a popular television show.
"Cameron would take Britain on a time-travel journey back to the socially divisive early-80s when the nation was scarred by youth unemployment and social unrest," the centre-left party said.