Five-point plan to help Tories

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Another week, another fashion. Suddenly the talk is of Conservative revival. A widely praised speech on Tory values, a rare victory at Prime Minister's Question Time and a well-judged shift towards democratic reform of the House of Lords: Iain Duncan Smith has plainly had a good week.

However, seven days of clement headlines cannot expunge a decade of calumny. Much more needs to be done. Here is a five-point plan for the Tory leader for the rest of this Parliament.

[1] Break with the past. In some ways you have already started. Your proposals for a smaller, largely elected upper house broke dramatically with the Tories' long-established support for hereditary peers and Prime Ministerial patronage. Michael Howard's insistence that improved public services must come ahead of tax cuts was also sensible.

The trouble is that these policies look more like instant reactions to short-term problems than trailblazers for a new set of political principles. To prove your determination to strike out in a new direction, you must make a tougher, more fundamental declaration of your political credo - and then persuade your party to embrace it.

That is what Tony Blair did when he announced his plan to rewrite Clause Four of Labour's constitution, and thereby abandon its commitment to traditional socialism. Having announced it, he embarked on a six-month crusade to convert his party, culminating in a special conference and a decisive vote. That proved to voters he really had exorcised the ghosts of old Labour. What is your Clause Four, and where is your crusade?

While you are thinking about that, a simple apology for privatising the railways would help.

[2] Arrange a public execution of your party's extremists. Again, Labour's journey back from the edge of oblivion provides some useful lessons. Neil Kinnock's finest week came when he denounced Militant at Labour's 1985 party conference and, the following day, condemned Arthur Scargill for his dreadful leadership of the miners' union during its reckless and suicidal strike against the National Coal Board.

So far your gestures have been sensible but far too modest - declining to join the Carlton Club, and ejecting the Right-wing Monday Club from the Tory orbit. Something far bigger is needed. A purge of those who would withdraw Britain from the European Union is one possibility. Had Kenneth Clarke become leader, he could not have done this without provoking civil war. You, in contrast, are ideally placed. As a Euro-sceptic you could take on the europhobic far-Right just as Mr Kinnock, coming from Labour's Left-wing, was able to carry the great majority of his party in extruding its extremists.

Remember: the sight of a divided party is damaging only when the party leader seems to lose control.

Then, as Michael Foot and John Major discovered, division is fatal. But a pitched battle that the leader decides to fight and then wins: that is a very different matter.

[3] Neutralise the negatives.

Labour could not return to power until it had persuaded enough voters that it was no longer untrustworthy on defence, too soft on the unions and liable to impoverish us with sharply higher taxes. The Tories' equivalent ball-and-chain is the electorate's fear that it would wreck our public services.

William Hague's way of dealing with this problem was to ignore it. He talked about almost everything except schools, hospitals and railways. You have rightly adopted a different stance. You hardly ever mention Europe, and most of your questions to the Prime Minister each Wednesday are about Labour's failures to improve our services.

However, the big task is still to come: developing a distinctive set of policies that can persuade the voters of middle Britain that children and patients will be safe in Tory hands.

[4] Make sure your party is as varied as the rest of 21st century Britain. In particular, you must ensure it sheds its image as white, male, middle-class and homophobic. This is a fatal liability in an era when such a stance alienates far too many potential voters and, indeed, potential activists.

Currently, the Tories have no nonwhite or openly gay MPs. Only 14 out of 166 are women. William Hague was undoubtedly sincere when he said he wanted to rectify these biases. But the results did not match his rhetoric. A party that claims to represent the whole nation must start to look like the whole nation. If you reject formal, positive discrimination, you need to find other ways to achieve the same objective.

Don't be deterred by people like John Redwood who said yesterday that the Tories should concentrate on public services rather than the social liberal agenda. These are not alternatives. You must do both.

[5] Be patient. Millions of voters still have bitter memories of the last Tory government. These will take time to fade - just as it took Labour an age to recover from its reputation as the party which, when last in power, had landed Britain with strikes, unburied bodies and the Winter of Discontent.

There is another reason to be patient. Britain's electoral system is now heavily tilted against the Tories. To become Prime Minister you need a 10.4 per cent swing - almost exactly what Labour achieved in 1997. So it is possible but, unless the current government screws up bigtime, unlikely.

Your ambition for the next election should be more modest. The Tories will do well to gain 50 seats. That would take its total to 216. If you are bold and persistent in tackling all of the tasks listed above, then, with a little luck, your party could do almost as well next time as it did in 1945.