BRITAIN: A suddenly embattled Mr Iain Duncan Smith insists he will lead the Conservative Party into the next British general election. He has also vowed to silence the "drumbeats from the past" with a flurry of policy initiatives during this week's Conservative conference in Bournemouth.
However "the past" was still haunting Conservative representatives as they headed for the seaside yesterday, with headlines proclaiming the news that Jeffrey Archer might face an extra year in jail over the deal to publish his prison diaries and revelations from legal documents suggesting the former prime minister, Mr John Major, would have been prepared to commit perjury in a libel action over an alleged affair.
Former minister Mrs Edwina Currie continued her book promotion, declaring her wish that Mr Major "could have been as good a prime minister as he was a lover", while Mr Duncan Smith branded the Major years a "disaster" in a ruthless attempt to distance himself and his party from the last Conservative prime minister.
Until now, many senior Conservatives have claimed Labour has benefited from the "golden economic legacy" bequeathed it by the Major administration.
Meanwhile, two of the last remaining "big beasts" from the old Tory jungle emerged to give momentum to the previously whispered suggestion that Mr Duncan Smith may have to be forced out before the general election.
Former deputy prime minister Lord Heseltine declined to comment on reports that he told colleagues last week Mr Duncan Smith should quit because he was making "no impact" on the British public. At the same time, the former chancellor, Mr Kenneth Clarke, playfully confirmed he would "never say never" to the possibility of a third bid for the party leadership. With Mr Heseltine reportedly of the view that it would be "too late" to delay a decision on Mr Duncan Smith's fate for another year, a separate report yesterday said former minister Mr Douglas Hogg was readying himself to sign a motion triggering a leadership contest should the party fail to register a significant revival in next May's local elections.
As if all this wasn't enough, the final instalment of the diaries of Alan Clark arrived on cue - laying bare his contempt for "little [William\] Hague" and "that duffer" Duncan Smith.
The "duffer" charge found more than an echo in the findings of two focus groups carried out by ICM for the Sunday Telegraph, where participants variously suggested the Tory leader might be a priest, accountant or civil servant and looked like "a warehouse manager".
The relentless message from the focus groups, that "IDS" is making no impact on the voting public, was reflected, too, in two fresh opinion polls. ICM's poll for the News of the World suggested the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats were now level-pegging with 24 per cent support, while Mr Duncan Smith's 14 per cent rating as best leader to be prime minister was lower than Mr Hague's 16 per cent before last year's general election.
A YouGov poll for ITV's Jonathan Dimbleby programme, meanwhile, found the Liberal Democrats were seen as the most effective opposition to Labour by 41 per cent, more than twice the 19 per cent who chose the Conservatives. Seemingly undaunted by all of this, Mr Duncan Smith evoked the memory of Margaret Thatcher yesterday to insist there was "no other way" than his for the party. Dismissing talk of unease in the ranks, he compared himself to Mrs Thatcher, who faced dissent over her leadership in 1975/76 ahead of her first election success in 1979.
"I am here to lead the party and I am going to lead the party because this party has to follow the strategy that I have set out, because there is no other way," Mr Duncan Smith told the BBC's Breakfast with Frost programme.
"The strategy I have set out is the strategy we will pursue. There is no magic wand. We must get the trust of the people back again and to do that we have to show there is a genuine alternative."
Critics who claimed the Conservatives had failed to set a clear set policy agenda to do that would get their answer from Bournemouth this week, he said.