Everyone’s favourite opponent is the one most recently defeated, which explains why many Tories now speak warmly of Ed Miliband. Their gratitude to him for losing the election has even unlocked an indulgent view of the case the former Labour leader tried to make: that insecurity, low wages and lack of opportunity are systemic flaws in Britain’s economy.

“I never thought Miliband was particularly bad,” says one backbench Conservative MP. “He was right about a lot of things. His time just hadn’t come.” A Downing Street adviser concedes the same point. “He was a good leader of the opposition. He actually had us on the ropes quite a few times.” Tory rhetoric since the election bears an imprint of that pressure. George Osborne’s national “living wage” and David Cameron’s post-polling day pledge to govern in the tradition of “one nation” Toryism are compliments to a vanquished adversary.

The place to go in parliament for unkind evaluations of Miliband’s legacy is the Labour benches. “I see Ed walking around here and I’m torn between feeling sorry for him and wanting to punch him in the face,” says one usually mild-mannered Labour MP. That is one of the more printable verdicts. The charge is that Miliband’s reign was a sequence of squandered opportunities and strategic blunders. Failure to address weaknesses in the party’s image in vital areas – economic trust, immigration, welfare – could be forgiven. What riles is the record of indulging views of Labour’s governing years as a time of moral decay; more corruption than enactment of left principle. Many MPs suspect that Miliband sees the ascent of Jeremy Corbyn as an endorsement of his own radical instincts, regretting only that he allowed cautious colleagues to hold him back. “He sees Corbynmania as Milibandism off its knees,” says one recovering Milibandite.

Some Conservative thinkers privately bemoan the limitations imposed by a kind of stubborn libertarianism in the ranks

That impression has been reinforced by the former leader’s pronouncements this week, breaking a long media silence. “I think events have rather vindicated me,” he told the BBC in an interview that also included a more robust defence of Corbyn’s credentials as a potential prime minister than most shadow cabinet ministers can muster on air.

The Labour left sees the party’s last five years as a period of soulless zombie Blairism and the right sees it as an accidental preface to unelectable Corbynism. That perversely leaves the task of dispassionate evaluation to those Tories who, behind closed doors, say Miliband was on to something. But what?

When George Osborne presents his comprehensive spending review to parliament today, there will be no obvious dissent from the government benches. Conservative MPs are as one in their support for the goals of austerity – a budget surplus by 2020 and the drastic changes to the shape of the state that implies. Concern about cuts to tax credits is mostly localised political anxiety: fear that the chancellor’s axe has landed in the wrong place, sabotaging efforts to cast the Tories as friends of the striving classes.

But some Tories detect a trend of dwindling public tolerance for pain. They look ahead with particular trepidation to the impact of shrinking local government budgets on social care for the elderly. Meanwhile, official figures for October show the Treasury yet again missing deficit and debt reduction targets. Falling unemployment, low inflation and weak opposition have allowed Osborne to eke political success from fiscal floundering. That pattern would not survive an external shock. Gordon Brown failed to eliminate the boom-bust cycle; Osborne has neither paid off the bust nor engineered the kind of wide-reaching boom that translates into lasting political gratitude.

This is where a discreet Tory Milibandism gains ground. The chancellor’s aides point to the living wage and a business levy to pay for apprenticeships as proof that his agenda is more sophisticated than mere state shrinkage. Michael Gove surprised his audience at a conference fringe meeting last month with the declaration that Conservatives should talk more about the “undeserving rich”, whose insulation from risk by unearned reward was discrediting the case for free market capitalism. Ruth Davidson, the party’s leader in Scotland, is unapologetic in making the case for robust government intervention in cases where it can no longer credibly be argued that the state is the obstacle to alleviating poverty. John Major made headlines recently with a lecture arguing that inequality blights an affluent society. It was an assertion that would have been unremarkable in the pre-Thatcher party. Iain Macleod, Ted Heath’s first chancellor, once cautioned against “setting the market free” on the grounds that it is “an excellent policy for the strong, but we are concerned also with the weak.”

Some Conservative thinkers, including Osborne allies, privately bemoan the limitations imposed by a kind of stubborn, frequent-flier libertarianism in the ranks. This is the reflex horror of the rich at any measure perceived as a challenge to business, on the grounds that it must be an assault on freedom; the belief that most taxes are violence against the entrepreneurial spirit.

Just as there is a tendency for denial in Labour that the party’s own supporters suffer at the hands of unresponsive, badly managed public services, there is a Tory tendency to imagine that resentment over price-gouging and fat-cattery in the private sector is just a nervous tic on the face of envious lefties. But just as there are moderates in Labour who accept that showing willingness to reform the state is the way to win permission for spending money on it, there are Tories who understand that public acquiescence to austerity is finite, while suspicion of Conservative motive is rife. Some even recognise that they are too reliant on super-rich donors, whose interests are not exactly aligned with the low-income families caught in a tax-credit crunch.

Smart Tories know they had a lucky escape in May. Miliband was right to see the potential in an agenda for more “responsible capitalism”, but his failure to develop it has left Labour looking neither responsible nor capitalist. He correctly identified an auspicious space for a party that can persuade voters it is committed jointly to enterprise and equality, social mobility and social security. It says something about the sorry state of British politics that this space is still vacant.