Throughout his recent national tour, Prime Minister Mulroney took every opportunity to boast of his unpopularity. The Conservatives' 14% standing in the polls was proof, it was implied, of their forthrightness, courage and vision. If you want someone to tell you what you want to hear, he repeated everywhere he went, vote for someone else: He would do what was right for Canada.

He must not be allowed to get away with this - and not only because the prime minister's brave defiance of the polls is itself based on a poll the Tories took early in their second term suggesting this would play well.

The Tories are not despised because they have been too radical or too candid. For they have been neither: or at least, where they have been radical they have not been candid, and where they have been candid, they have not been radical.

Think back. Not one of this government's major policy initiatives began out of any reforming impulse of its own. Each was forced upon it by external circumstances. Transport deregulation was driven by the need to keep shipping costs competitive with those in the deregulated U.S. Tax reform likewise followed the U.S. lead, and for much the same reasons. Free trade was born of fear that a protectionist Congress would shut the doors on Canadian exports.

The Tories can at least claim credit for responding to these pressures in a constructive way. But they cannot pass off improvisation as vision. The Tories have not sought to lead change, but to ''manage'' it. Their present difficulties are not those of a fearless government beset by an ignorant populace. They are those of a furtive government seeking to smuggle its policies in under cover of night.

The import of Mulroney's little campaign is that if Tory policies are unpopular, it is the voters' fault. But the task of government is not to do unpopular things; it is to make the things it does popular. The Tories have never tried to change the terms of debate, to give themselves home-field advantage in the arguments of the day. Instead, they have almost always tried to defend their own policies on their opponents' grounds.

The case for free trade, for example, was put not in the classical economists' terms of cheap imports, but in the mercantilist terms of more exports. Sometimes it was even less coherent than that. The image lingers of then-Trade Minister James Kelleher standing in the Commons to defend the abolition of import quotas on shoes, with the protest that ''no government has done more to protect the shoe industry than this one! ''

Where they have cut spending, the Tories have not done so as a positive act, based on the merits of the program to be cut, but rather blame it on the deficit. This makes them out to be narrow-minded bean counters, rather than wise stewards of the nation's finances. But since they also spend much time bragging of the amount spent on this or that pork-barrel program, they do not even come off as very good bean counters.

And on it goes. They have steadfastly refused to interfere with the market price of oil, while playing to the gallery that believes prices are fixed by a conspiracy of Big Oil. They have courageously pressed the cause of zero inflation, while profiting from inflation by de-indexing social programs. The resulting cognitive dissonance gives the public no frame of reference by which to judge government policy other than that of the opposition.

All of which stands in contrast to the government of Margaret Thatcher. No one understands Thatcherism who imagines it sprang fully formed from her brow, that all it amounted to was a determination to bull ahead, come what may. The spadework of Thatcherism was done more than 20 years before her, in such free- market think tanks as the Institute of Economic Affairs, and by the infiltration of radical intellectuals into what was once known as ''the Stupid Party.''

Its triumph in turn rested as much on such canny ''public choice'' tactics as selling shares in privatized firms to their unionized workers, as on the more frontal assaults on union power. But mostly it was based on straightforward persuasion. The Thatcherites trusted, as Mulroney's Tories never have, that the same arguments which had convinced them of the market's advantages would convince the public.

Governments do not typically fall because they are too radical. They fall, like bicycles, when they lose their momentum. Thatcher is gone, like David Lange in New Zealand and Tadeusz Mazowiecki in Poland, not because they pushed too far too fast, but because of inertia brought on by division within the ranks. Let Mulroney take heed: It is not change the public fears, but drift.