Everybody needs a Stephen Timms. The amiable financial secretary to the Treasury is the handy neighbour you get round to change a fuse, mend a leaky tap or go on the Today programme to defend your lamentable economic record.

Timms is the guy you call when you remember that you had promised a shiny new "Digital Britain", but then realised that the lord you'd commissioned to write the agenda-setting report has left and you'd forgotten to put someone else in charge.

As of last week, Timms has the task of making sure we all have high-speed broadband by 2012. It is a noble aim. Except it doesn't really matter, because in 2010 the nation has got David Cameron pencilled in to become prime minister.

Besides, as a political battleground, the Tories have kind of already won the internet. It isn't that they have winning policies. Their response to the digital Britain agenda was to try to turn it into another conversation about how the BBC costs too much and how Labour are generally rubbish.

"Instead of digital dithering from a dated government," said Jeremy Hunt, shadow culture secretary, nonchalantly thumbing the keys of his hand-held Glib 2.0 Cliche-O-Meter, "we need new economy dynamism from a new Conservative government." They get away with it because Team Cameron is breezily at home with the new technology, while Team Brown is queasily at sea.

After the McBride-Draper email smear scandal, Downing Street should probably have abandoned any thoughts of trying to be clever with a computer. But they couldn't. So the symbolic moment where Labour actually surrendered the web came when Gordon Brown recorded that YouTube video during the expenses row: restless pacing through the Downing Street garden, his words stripped of meaning after their uncomfortable journey through that gritted, staccato smile. When some future tragedian writes Gordon Brown: The Opera, that will be the mad scene, when the great unravelling began. "He is an analogue politician in a digital age," David Cameron once said of Brown in a Commons clash. It was a clever, spiteful jibe. No one could be entirely sure what it meant, but in some slippery way, it felt true.

So what? Gordon is a bit of a Luddite and Cameron is effortlessly webogenic, disgorging faux-intimate video diaries on demand. What has any of that got to do with real politics, the economy, public spending? Quite a lot, according to the Tory high command. Key members of Cameron's inner circle worship new technology with revolutionary fervour. They have seen the way the internet has transformed the worlds of commerce and media and foresee – rightly – that politics is due an equivalent, massive change.

There are, in fact, two distinct ways in which digital technology has a direct impact on the way politics operates. First, it opens up a new media arena in which a campaign can be fought, which can include blogging, social networking and soliciting donations online. Second, it opens up new channels for the delivery of public services, which could include anything from taking tax payments to processing school applications to prescribing Tamiflu.

The Tories have got the campaigning part sewn up. They've never had a go at the e-governing part, but flatter themselves that they'd be pretty good at it.

In every sector, the disruptive force of the internet has tended to be centrifugal and atomising – dispersing power to individual consumers. That, David Cameron believes, makes it inherently conservative. This is what he means when he bangs on about the "post-bureaucratic age". And he isn't pretending. Cameron is too image-obsessed to use such an ugly phrase unless he thinks it is profound.

"We're instinctively sceptical of the state… and instead trust society. That's why we've always been the party of the free market and now, more than ever, history is on our side," the Conservative leader said in a speech last year, a couple of months before history went off the free market. "Dynamic change in commerce and in our broader culture is helping to make the top-down model history. The internet is transforming people's lives, making their ambitions greater and their horizons broader."

In other words, the digital revolution is Thatcherite; tomorrow belongs to the Tories. Steve Hilton, Cameron's chief strategist, has been pivotal in developing this idea. He spent much of the last year commuting between London and San Francisco, where his partner, Rachel Whetstone, has been working for Google. George Osborne, a bit of a geek at heart, is fully signed up. So is Nick Boles, an old Eton friend of Cameron and part of his "implementation unit", responsible for weeding rash spending promises and other ideological impurities out of every idea the shadow cabinet comes up with.

The Tory techno advantage is partly just an accident of generations. Tony Blair had never sent an email before he arrived in Downing Street and didn't send any once he got there. When the real explosion of new media happened, the Labour top brass was a bit bogged down with the analogue stuff of government; wars and the like. While George Osborne was dreaming up phrases like "the Googlisation of politics", Peter Mandelson was working out EU trade policy.

Most web evangelism is born of listless intellectual energy and frustrated ambition. It sounds like a minor detail, but it matters that the younger members of the Tory team have simply had a bit more time on their hands to fiddle around online.

Partly, the Tories have also been encouraged by the loose anti-government, anti-state bias in the world of blogging and social media. Web culture sprang out of Californian techno-hippy libertarianism. Online, the individual voice is sovereign and any attempt to introduce rules or regulation is injurious.

The Cameroons think that makes the Tories more naturally prepared for the Brave New World than Labour (which they insist plots to expand the state for the sake of it). Cameron likes to point out that ConservativeHome, the Tory activists' frothy online salon of choice, has become an organic component of the party while retaining total independence from the leadership and sometimes hosting trenchant attacks on it. Gordon Brown, he speculates, would never tolerate such a thing. He is right.

But it's much easier to tolerate dissenting voices when they are the minority. And the fact of being against the incumbent government has given the Tories a digital advantage. Identifying gleefully with the anti-government techie culture may become a problem once they actually are the government.

Cameron thinks he's solved this one. The magic of the internet is that it does some things on the cheap. The joy of "post bureaucracy", you see, is that it doesn't employ bureaucrats. The idea, Cameron says, is "not just shaving a bit off this budget here; that cost there". Instead, he envisages "replacing whole chunks of the expensive, bureaucratic government machine with more modern methods". By outsourcing public services online you shrink the state, give power to the people and balance the national budget. Historic conservative mission accomplished.

That is the kind of thinking that led the Tories last month to float the cockamamie notion of using Google Health, the search engine's medical data storage unit, to host NHS records and ease pressure on the Department of Health budget. "So naive I could only hope that it was an unapproved kite-flying exercise by a young researcher in Conservative HQ," thundered David Davis, knowing full well that the idea was first touted by Cameron in a speech in April.

The Tories will doubtless make some digital cost savings. They could hardly be more profligate on IT gizmos than Labour, as anyone who has used the NHS "choose and book" system knows. (Your GP tells you to go to the nearest hospital and prints out a telephone number, which you later call to make your appointment – total cost: £3.6bn.)

But lopping big money off budgets isn't easy. The Digital Britain report included a chapter on the wider benefits of providing public services online. But the only net budget saving it could cite from e-government was £8m from the DVLA allowing people to process car tax online. That's around 0.009% of the deficit recouped. Now for the other £89.99bn.

The Tories are sailing towards power on a strong technological tail wind. But for Cameron and Co to think that translates into a long-term political advantage, let alone a cogent ideology, is delusional. They look admiringly at the energy of social networking sites and at the voluntarism and entrepreneurship that characterise web innovation and they see in it a vast store of civic power. If only, they think, that could be harnessed to meet the social obligations that Labour thinks belong to the state. This is the Holy Grail of so-called compassionate conservatism: to pull back the tide of government, confident that civil society will grow organically into the gap. But there is no substance to it, no evidence, just wireless faith.

What will actually happen is that chunks of the public sector will be parcelled out to online providers, but instead of mass privatisation it will be called post-bureaucratisation. And when it emerges that Facebook and Mumsnet are not quite equal to the task of supplanting the welfare state, social policy will be back to the old, analogue drawing board.