In 2001, there were two good reasons for supporting Mr Duncan Smith: he was neither Kenneth Clarke nor Michael Portillo. Mr Portillo is an interesting, highly intelligent man on a voyage of self-discovery. This has involved train trips through Europe, television programmes on Wagner and stints as a shelf-stacker in a supermarket. Fascinating stuff, but he could not be allowed to use the leadership as another chapter in his Bildungsroman. Before you take that job, you have to know who you are and what you believe.Not that Ken Clarke could ever be accused of self-doubt. He knew why he wanted to lead the Tory party: so that he could get stuck in to Tony Blair for failing to abolish the pound.

Fortunately, Mr Clarke's opposition to the Iraq war has destroyed his last chance of leading the Tory party; that makes it safe as well as necessary to hold another leadership contest.Mr Duncan Smith was elected for negative reasons He has not begun to convert them into positive ones. At the time, some of his supporters – including me – hoped that he might turn into another Truman or Attlee: a first-class leader if not a first-class intellect But he has not grown into the job. He has shrunk in it, further diminishing his party's ?n vital.The Tory party's problems are easily summarised Most voters neither know what it stands for nor trust it. Most Tory MPs are aware of this, yet see no way to put things right. That is why Tory MPs' morale has never been lower.Disraeli told his fellow Tories that unless their party was a national one, it was nothing.

For most of the subsequent century and a quarter, it was not only possible for Tories to agree with him; they could feel complacent while doing so. In recent years, however, there has been a growing fear in Tory circles that the bonds which link party and country have been broken. Hence the despairing, self-flagellatory tone which the so-called Tory modernisers adopt, as if a party which had given such service to the nation could only justify its future by apologising for its past.Such grovellings are as unnecessary as they are self-destructive Britain is still a profoundly conservative country. This has been acknowledged by much the most formidable analyst of contemporary public opinion, although he has still to embody his work in academic form: one Tony Blair. Mr Blair has based most of his political programme on a theft of Tory themes and an infiltration into Tory territory. Where his instincts place him at odds with Tory ones, most notably over the euro, he has deferred to Tory Britain.

It would be absurd for any Tory to be less confident in the electoral appeal of Toryism than the leader of the Labour Party is.Under good leadership, the Tories' poll ratings would be well up in the forties, especially now that Mr Blair's domestic agenda is in such trouble. The voters want to know when they are going to receive value for their money which the Government has spent on public services. Mr Blair only seems interested in telling them that he has been walking with God. Those of us who always believed that Tony Blair would disappear up his own spin have been underestimating him. It now looks as if he will disappear up his own apotheosis.Unless IDS rescues him. Even a failed government can retain power if the opposition is led by an implausible alternative prime minister.