The British Conservative Party leader, Mr Iain Duncan Smith, faces a huge challenge at the party's conference this week if he is to rescue it from a fate still worse than its current eclipse by New Labour - being passed out by the LibDems as the public's alternative party of government.
Polls published yesterday show that he may already have left it too late. A News of the World ICM poll shows the LibDems and the Tories both on 24 per cent, trailing Labour on 43 per cent. It found Mr Duncan Smith's approval rating as potential Prime Minister at 14 per cent. That is worse than the lowest figure recorded for his predecessor, Mr William Hague.
Asked to rate the opposition, voters polled by ITV ranked the LibDems more than twice as effective as the Tories.
Among 15 to 25-year-olds, only one in ten now describe themselves as Tories.
Mr Duncan Smith has promised to unveil an array of new policies this week. They are said to range from plans to extend state funding of private education to new ideas about private services in the health sector.
The Tory leader is doing what he can to dissociate himself from public memories of the party's last Prime Minister, Mr John Major. And not just because of the revelations of the latter's dalliance with Ms Edwina Currie.
Yesterday he told the Sunday Telegraph that, under Mr Major's watch: "Businesses went to the wall, we broke our pledges on taxes, there was negative equity in homes, the public felt hurt. Then we lectured them and we seemed arrogant." At the same time he appeared to try to pick up the mantle of Baroness Thatcher, not a paragon of modesty. Mr Duncan Smith's exhortation to his troops that "there is no other way" than his own uncannily echoes the Thatcherite "there is no alternative."
Yet the lacklustre Mr Duncan Smith, is no Mrs T. And the times have moved on.
Nothing is more certain to consign the Tories to history than a continued failure to come to terms with the achievement of the Blairite revolution in capturing the middle ground of British politics by embracing much of the Tory programme and wrapping it in the garb of community. For the Tories to abandon that ground and tack yet further to the right would be to embrace a lemming-like wish for extinction.