“Choose jobs. Choose enterprise. Choose security. Choose life. Choose good health. I choose something else…” The cryogenically frozen, reactivated cadaver that now masquerades as the chancellor chose Trainspotting as the inspiration for the payoff to his final conference speech before the election.

Rapid weight loss, waxy complexion, vacant eyes, a smile that doesn’t connect to his facial expression. Some might also suspect George Osborne of method reading. The economy might still be a bit ropey but it’s now in much better shape than its minder.

As the chancellor’s speech went on, David Cameron started nodding off in the audience, his eyelids fighting to stay open, though less in solidarity with his next-door neighbour’s state of ill-being and more because there were large sections that didn’t much apply to him. A freeze on jobseeker’s allowance. Whatever. A freeze on tax credits. Whatever. A freeze on universal credit, child benefit, income support … get on with it. The prime minister looked far more animated at the announcement that pension tax would be abolished. Here was a policy that really meant something to the country’s hard-working well-off like him.

“I choose the future,” said Osborne, uncomfortably aware that more and more of his audience now much prefer the look of the Ukip past. He too, though, appeared ambivalent about the way he was facing. Much of his inspiration was rooted in the Industrial Revolution. He’d looked into the minds of James Watt, Matthew Boulton and William Murdoch and realised that if they were still alive they would all be thinking exactly the same way as him. Just as well Osborne wasn’t alive when they were or we might still be in the dark ages.

The head-swivelling didn’t stop there. Having spent the best part of 10 minutes boasting about the achievements of his forecasts being at least £50bn off track and having increased the deficit in the first five months of the year, Osborne declared: “I don’t stand here marvelling at how much we have done.” Those in the conference hall would have much rather he had continued to do just that for the next half hour. Osborne has always been too spectral and aloof a presence for the Tories to love him and as he outlined his plans, it began to dawn on them they had been right to be wary. If the message from the Labour conference had been that Miliband was on the side of incompetence, the message from Osborne was the Tories would be fighting the election as the party of hard bastards.

This wasn’t quite the happy-go-lucky free money and electoral bribes the perms and striped shirts had anticipated, but Osborne did find some support from an unlikely quarter. Deirdre Kelly – aka White Dee off TV’s Benefits Street – had earlier told a fringe event she would be in favour of benefits claimants being forced to have a card to prevent them from spending the money on fags and booze. Not that she had ever done that, mind. Her kids had always come first. Osborne’s face would have flushed to an off-white at that; as would the physiog of his ghostly enforcer-in-chief, Iain Duncan Smith, who was at that very moment putting the finishing touches to the design of just such a card that he would be announcing in the afternoon. Should Scrounger be just in bold or SCROUNGER in caps and bold? Never let it be said IDS is afraid to make the big decisions.

Sadly for both Osborne and IDS, Dee also said she would probably vote Ukip. Dee had chosen the past. Osborne left the stage to a Fleetwood Mac song from 1977. He, too, seemed to find the past irresistible.