Ed Balls is right - the Conservative party have an "insufficient" growth policy, according to top Tory activist Tim Montgomerie.
ConservativeHome editor Montgomerie said his party had "stopped talking about the economy" as a result of their modernisation agenda.
"We have a deficit agenda but we do not have - I am afraid Ed Balls was right on this - we do not have a sufficient growth agenda."
He told a fringe meeting at the Conservative party conference: "The modernisation project actually produced very limited results".
Speaking on a panel alongside modernising Tory MP Nick Boles, Tim Montgomerie said the Conservatives failure to gain a majority during the 2010 election was a "banned topic" at conference.
Boles blamed the loss on the Conservatives still being seen as "on the side of the rich".
He said his party was "seen to be people who are rich, who hang out with rich people, who are concerned about poor people", adding that the action taken by the coalition government to reduce the deficit had not helped.
"We're not seen as on the side of ordinary people… As a result of the essential steps that we have taken in government to deal with the budget deficit - and I have absolutely no quarrel with any element of that, the problem, the perception of us has actually probably got a bit worse.
"Because we've had to make some severe cuts to services that people rely on and that created memories and it has reawakened memories of what people think that we were like in the 80s when we were in government."
And Boles argued the party should start to talk about the issues the public cares about rather than "banging on about the things we care about" such as Europe, to win the next election - as well as "lovebombing" their coalition partners .
"The only successful strategy for the Lib Dems is one which Eric Pickles - a great man and no softy lefty - articulated and led before the last election, which is love bomb them. Hug them close. It's the boa constrictor strategy. Boa constrictors tend to have one result on the person they are hugging and that is one which I think we all want to achieve
"Of course we've got to know what our beliefs and values are, but they've got to be relevant to people"
He added: "Ideological purity is entirely worthless if you have a Labour government."