Where are the Tories? Boris Johnson appears on TV from time to time, and his party machine is said to be in the midst of a social media blitz. But wherever I have been over the past month, the supposed likely winners in this election have been all but invisible. I have encountered Labour, Liberal Democrat and Brexit party activists, but no teams of Conservatives. The party and its leader come up in conversation, and plenty of people say the Tories will get their vote, but there is a strange, almost ghostly aspect to the story: amid the noise, there is a party trying to creep back into power while making as little impression as possible.

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Think about the reality of Tory politics out in the country, and this sense of absence adds up. By contrast with Labour’s 450,000-plus members, the Conservatives are reckoned to have around 160,000. How many of them are active is unclear, but four out of 10 are aged over 65, and 70% are men. After a decade of cuts, many of their councillors seem to be in a state of despondency and disaffection, complaining that their colleagues in national positions of power will not listen.

What is 21st-century Conservatism actually about? For this election, the Tories have relentlessly hammered “get Brexit done”. Whatever its underlying cynicism, it’s one of the few campaign slogans that has cut through to the public, and carries the promise of a quietening of the mad noise of recent politics. At a time when the public’s weariness with Westminster has reached a peak, it may well be enough to get the Tories over the line. But what will they do when the noise around Brexit has abated?

When a party is running out of steam, the signs are usually pretty clear. If you want an instant sense of malaise, consider the senior ministerial positions given to Dominic Raab, Priti Patel and Jacob Rees-Mogg, not to mention the recent ubiquity of the indefatigable Mark Francois. Meanwhile, the British right’s intellectual vanguard seems consumed by such issues as campus free speech, and the west’s supposed civilisational clash with Islam. Brexit, of course, has already soaked Tory politics in such an ocean of minutiae and arcana that the space for any meaningful thinking about the state of society may simply not exist.

Small wonder, then, that the Conservative manifesto is awash with platitudes and piecemeal policies that fall far short of any convincing story about the present condition of Britain, let alone its future. “We will build a Britain in which everyone has the opportunity to make the most of their talents,” it says. There is nothing that really fleshes this out, beyond old, very familiar pledges: tax rates being left alone, a points-based immigration system, and hardline noises on crime and punishment. Some of this is down to the way that parties are cast and recast in the image of their leaders – and under Johnson, a kind of meandering opportunism was always going to define the Tory offer. But the sense of a party with precious little to say that is convincing or relevant also reflects two growing gaps between Conservatism and the country at large.

One is widely recognised. It is all about Brexit, the demise of David Cameron and George Osborne’s dream of Conservative modernisation, and the way the Tories’ ramped-up nationalism and air of nastiness are cutting across the party’s old bond with the increasingly liberal English suburbs, while distancing it even further from millions of voters aged under 50. The other, so far comparatively overlooked, is about the post-Thatcher settlement palpably falling apart, leaving a party still wedded to the small state and free market with increasingly little to say.

Given the chance, it is obvious what some ambitious, energised Tories would still like to do: as evidenced by Britannia Unchained, the infamous book co-authored in 2012 by Patel, Raab and their fellow minister Liz Truss, theirs is a vision of Thatcherism on steroids and the market extended to the few parts of society it has not yet reached. But as I have talked to people over the past few weeks, one of the most striking things I keep hearing is the sense of a view of the country sharply at odds with all that, voiced by people irrespective of which party they might support on Thursday.

Most people do not use the word “austerity”, but you hear a lot of talk about “cutbacks”. Even voters minded to back the Conservatives usually agree that they have gone too far, and that society is now full of cracks that need to be mended. The NHS, to paraphrase that Tory sage Nigel Lawson, remains the closest thing English people have to a national religion, and they are worried about its predicament. People talk about low pay and insecurity, and the often forlorn state of their town centres.

The fact that this does not lead many of them to consider voting Labour is partly an indication of the way Brexit has contorted our politics, but also an indictment of how Jeremy Corbyn and his allies have lost any strong message about the country’s predicament in a haze of numbers and increasingly incredible offers to the public. Beyond what remains of the true-blue heartlands, there are significant chunks of the country where mistrust of Labour and its leader seems to run deeper than scepticism about Johnson and the Tories. But still: if I were a Tory, I would worry about the public’s low, rumbling unease, and where it might go in the future.

Two or three years into the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition, there was talk of somehow turning the Tories into “the workers’ party”, and the need for a new “blue-collar conservatism”. A few years before, David Cameron had fleetingly embraced the devolving, localist visions of “red Toryism”. There were also flashes of a potential way forward for the Tories in Theresa May’s brief interest in inequality and the power of the state fused with tradition and duty, and a tilt away from London. In the face of the Tories’ unchanged Thatcherite beliefs, it was perhaps inevitable that few of these things ever resulted in any convincing policy ideas. There again, given their past talent for reinvention, and the skill at selling capitalism to the electorate that propelled them through the 20th century, such new thinking might conceivably have grown into something with electoral potential.

But nothing happened. It is nearly 40 years since the advent of the last genuinely transformative Tory idea, which was actually borrowed from a reluctant Labour party: enabling people to buy their council houses. This policy, aptly enough, now sits at the heart of the shortage of homes and defines so many of the country’s current furies. The supposed natural party of government now hides from scrutiny, anxiously hanging on to Brexit while knowing it has almost nothing else to say. The Tories may be about to win, but if they do, it looks set to be the most pyrrhic of victories. This is what may yet be known as Johnsonism: a mixture of populist authoritarianism and unseriousness that refuses to think about the future, but stumbles on regardless, as the English ruling class so often does.

• John Harris is a Guardian columnist