Conservative MPs are getting cross and that is never a pretty sight. The autumn political season has opened to Tories barking their discontents. They gnash that "this government isn't doing anything for our people", they wail "you wouldn't know that most of the cabinet is supposed to be Conservative", and they clamour "David Cameron must show us he is a proper Tory".

These generalised complaints are accompanied by a set of specific grievances. For a body on the right of the party, the government is letting them down by being too soft on immigration and failing to seize on the summer riots to get much tougher on law'n'order. For others, the greatest disappointment is the absence of rapid tax-cutting and a bonfire of business regulation. There are even some rightwing Tories who think that the main thing wrong with government economic policy is that the spending cuts are not severe enough. Probably the largest cohort of restive Conservatives are those who yearn to exploit the crises in the eurozone to declare war on Brussels.

They can't contain their frustration that their cabinet generals seem shy of battle. A new Tory backbench group, which has been created to campaign for Britain to rewrite its relationship with the European Union, will meet for the first time tomorrow. William Hague says he and David Cameron are relaxed about these backbench agitators. I'm not sure I would be entirely sanguine were I at the top of the Conservative party. Whenever Europe has aroused Tory passions over the past two decades, it has proved to be incendiary, factionalising and self-destructive.

When they are looking for someone to blame for what they see as the timidity of the coalition, the obvious place for Tory MPs to start is with Nick Clegg. To many critics of the left, the Lib Dem leader was a dupe when he jumped into bed with them last year. But seen from a certain Conservative perspective, it is he who has made a hostage of the Tory party. They would have a truly, boldly, radically Conservative government – or so they think – were it not for those pesky, meddling Lib Dems forever demanding concessions and compromises. These Tories have persuaded themselves – though they don't convince me – that Mr Cameron would be mobilising for conflict over the European treaties were it not for the presence in government of those Europe-loving, fifth columnist Lib Dems led by a half-Dutch, part-Russian former MEP.

It's not just Europe that brings foam to their mouths. On issue after issue, some Tory MPs can be heard to complain, the yellow tail of the coalition is wagging the blue dog. This boiled to the surface in the Commons when two Tory MPs used the platform of prime minister's questions to protest that Mr Clegg had too much sway. Complaining of Lib Dem influence over "our free school policy, health, many issues including immigration and abortion", the ineffable Nadine Dorries demanded of David Cameron that "it is about time he told the deputy prime minister who is the boss". The prime minister laughed her off with a bit of sexual innuendo about Ms Dorries being "extremely frustrated" and sat back down without offering an answer. Then Mr Cameron squeezed Mr Clegg on the arm as if to console the Lib Dem leader.

Mr Clegg did not need any comforting. Far from hurting him, Ms Dorries had inadvertently paid a very welcome compliment to the Lib Dem leader. Since the inception of the coalition, he has been cruelly caricatured by the cartoonists as the trodden-upon servant or the naive fall-guy of the prime minister. Here was a Conservative MP suggesting that, to the contrary, Mr Clegg is a cunning manipulator who has David Cameron wrapped around his little Lib Dem finger. If he has to choose between being depicted as the puppet of the Tories or the puppet-master, the Lib Dem leader would much rather be seen as the man holding the strings than the man dangling from them.

It will help Mr Clegg to get through what could be a tricky party conference later in the month if Lib Dem activists are persuaded that their ministers are punching above their numbers and running rings around the Conservatives. He could not have a better endorsement for that claim than Tory MPs moaning that the Lib Dem influence within the coalition is disproportionate to their weight.

It has been Mr Clegg's strategy since the defeat on the AV referendum, which followed the debacle over student tuition fees, to be more assertive of his party's identity and to pick more open fights with the Conservatives. That increased aggression is another reason for Tory MPs to get lathered. They loathe to be told by prating, sanctimonious Lib Dems that it is only their presence that prevents this from being a thoroughly beastly government. The response of the Tory right – though they do not know it – plays into the hands of the Lib Dems. At the next election, Mr Clegg will be well-served if middle Britain thinks of his party as the liberal leash on what would otherwise have been a rabid, rightwing government. As one Lib Dem strategist says: "That's what we'd like to put in voters' minds."

Thoughtful Tories see this risk. Damian Green, a minister on the liberal wing of the Conservative party, has given a timely caution that the "seductive chorus" urging a lurch to the right would leave the Lib Dems in possession of the "moderate and progressive" aspects of the coalition.

The truth is that Nick Clegg is not really the person who most aggrieves stroppy Tory MPs. He may irritate them like hell, but they can comprehend that he is bound to fight for the Lib Dem corner. The person they are most angry with – deep down and maybe not so deep down – is David Cameron. One simplistic school of Tory thought has it that their leader is too lacking in conviction, energy and steel to secure a full-on rightwing agenda. He allows the Lib Dems to have their way more often than he should because he can't be bothered enough to fight.

A more sophisticated school of unhappy Tories think that David Cameron uses the Lib Dems as an excuse for not doing things he didn't want to do anyway. Too often, for their tastes, he calls himself a "liberal Conservative" with almost as much emphasis on the first word as the last. This has more plausibility as an analysis. Most of the things about this government that upset rightwing Tories are not actually down to the Lib Dems. The chancellor has not retained the 50p tax rate on higher earners, which a lot of Tories would like to scrap, because that was forced on them by the Lib Dems. It was in opposition, when they expected to form a government on their own, that David Cameron and George Osborne made a commitment to keep Labour's top rate for a period. They did so because they feared to look like a party that was only interested in looking after their friends among the rich. The increase in spending on overseas aid – another target for the wrath of the right – was another Tory pre-election commitment designed to demonstrate that they were a changed party. The stiffest opposition to tighter curbs on immigration has come from Conservative cabinet members who don't think slamming the door on all foreign workers is either practical or desirable. As for crime and punishment, both the home secretary and the justice secretary are Conservatives.

The Tory right give too much credit to Mr Clegg when they complain that he has prevented David Cameron from marching off to Brussels, swinging the Margaret Thatcher memorial handbag, to demand the return of British sovereignty. The prime minister is a Eurosceptic, but he is also acutely aware how much damage his party did to itself in the past by going demented on the subject. Long before he started his cohabitation with Mr Clegg, the Tory leader warned his party that he thought he would probably have better and more productive things to do as prime minister than trying to entirely re-write the terms of Britain's relationship with the EU. He got his "betrayal" on Europe in early. He dropped his pledge to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty before the last election, not after it.

Whichever leader they blame for their disappointments, the eyes of these angry Tories are too fogged with blue mist to see the world clearly. One thing they neglect is how much of the government's agenda is actually led by Conservatives. They appear to be too consumed with their grievances to notice that, on welfare reform and schools to name but two, this government is pursuing a more ambitious programme than anything ever attempted by Margaret Thatcher when she led solely Conservative governments with landslide majorities of more than 100. That is quite an achievement for a Tory party that didn't actually win the last election. The voters, in their supreme wisdom, declined to give any party a parliamentary majority. That is why, duh, there is a coalition. Conservative MPs are demanding that David Cameron govern as if the Tories had a landslide when their party did not win any sort of majority at all. They seem to have forgotten that failure. Or perhaps their real problem is that they cannot forgive it.