YOU could say William Hague makes promises at the drop of a hat, if it wasn't for the fact that hats are now so rare. As my colleague Bryan Marlowe noted yesterday, the trilby and the bowler are long gone. Even the Tory leader's own baseball cap has vanished, perhaps to reappear in Scotland Yard's Black Museum (fashion police division).

If Mr Hague's promises really were commensurate with dropping hats, then Britain would now be enduring record hatfall. This paper would be filled with reports on the Great Hat Crisis 2000, with stirring tales of how the fire brigade rescued folk trapped by huge hat drifts.

That is to say, Mr Hague just cannot stop making promises. It is almost pathological, like Tourette's Syndrome with policy pledges blurted out instead of profanities.

Take Tony Martin. The farmer was convicted for murder after shooting a teenage burglar in the back, causing mass outrage at the Daily Mail. The moment William heard, he could not stop himself. "The Conservative Party will pardon Mr Martin. And give him a knighthood. And - listen to this Ffion - every country dweller who drags the corpse of a juvenile delinquent into Tory HQ will win a dinner for two with Jim Davidson!"

Since then he has been spraying policies about willy-nilly. Mr Hague has been accused of knee-jerk politics: that's half right.

Fuel crisis? "We will cut fuel tax!" Health service? "We will match Government spending and then spend loads more!" Law and order? "We will bring back the ducking stool for litter louts!" Inner city deprivation? "We will ban inner cities. Outer cities for all!"

Perhaps Mr Hague is such an intellectual giant that his mighty brain can generate a thousand ideas a second. Then again, it might just be youthful impetuosity. You can imagine him insisting to the Shadow Cabinet that thoroughly considered, carefully-drafted policies are "sooo boooring, guys! Hey, I just like to mind-riff, y'know, extemporise..." Hmm, that's just what Middle England wants - political jazz.

Whatever the reason, Mr Hague is getting himself into trouble. Those who indulge in marketing jargon would say he is flying a few kites. So many, in fact, that a few mid-air collisions are inevitable.

One moment he insists that his is the party of low tax and pledges cuts in fuel duty. The next he suggests that the Tories will spend billions on everything from the health service to better pensions to the rebuilding of inner cities.

Mention asylum seekers and he shakes his fist at all those foreigners on the scrounge. But who might he be welcoming to make up the British shortfall in doctors and nurses? Step forward our very welcome guests from abroad...

Demolish Sixties tower blocks, Mr Hague said this week. He failed to mention where he might put all the residents, when there is already mounting pressure for more housing.

The Tories, he went on, would block big housing developments in the South-East, discouraging large-scale immigration from the North. How does that square with the Tory belief in self-determination? Whatever happened to every adult's right to get on their bike to find work?

William Hague is now too parochial to be a Little Englander. He's a little South-East Of Englander. And this from a man who used Sunday's tame television documentary to emphasise his Yorkshire roots.

None of Mr Hague's ideas are set in stone, of course. They are not even set in sand. They come and go on the breeze.

That's probably for the best. If he were committing the Tories to all these ideas, their manifesto would be heavier than War And Peace. Instead it is likely to be a slim volume, more in keeping with its author: a political lightweight.