From Left: IDS and Kinnock

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Nothing can alter the fact that he has the same chance of ever forming a government as Adam Ant, Keith Harris's Orville or the philosopher Caprice (who else could get away with plugging her new book, Reclaiming Kant, on daytime TV?). Even so, Iain Duncan Smith seems not to be the 24-carat buffoon some of us assumed. Say what you will about the Great Acronym - and tapes of his oratory could be used as makeshift anaesthetic for patients with weak hearts - he has cottoned on to a perception that eluded William Hague: that the Conservatives' best hope of power this side of Doomsday is to reposition themselves, on some issues at least, somewhere to the Left of New Labour.

His soft-shoe shuffle across the political dance floor has opened with some startlingly meaty steps. One minute his chaps talk progressively about crime, the next they whisper sweet nothings about rights for gays, then they humiliate Mr Blair with sensible proposals for an elected upper house that make his own preferred senate of sycophants look grubbier than ever.

Whatever next? Although these first seeds of recovery will need at least one more election to mature into trees, let alone to bear fruit, thank the Lord that British politics is finally waking from its coma.

For various reasons - the Government's hyper-Thatcherite dogma about using private money for public services; the increasingly tiresome autocratic centralism; the luminescent lack of original thought in this Cabinet of none of the talents - disenchantment grows by the week. One could, of course, talk about the "new" 10-year plan for the railways or rescuing the NHS, but only in the way Stephen Hawking discusses time travel - as something utterly intriguing, perhaps even theoretically possible, but not odds-on to happen in our lifetimes. The only 10-year plan that the PM hasn't flammed up in five minutes on the back of an envelope, needless to say, is the one that involves him winning two more uncontested elections and then becoming president of Earth in a United Federation of Planets.

While the Government's ideological aims remain enshrouded in a peasouper of opaque commitments and nebulous pledges, one thing is becoming clear (and here we must pour the double cream over this portion of humble pie). Mr Duncan Smith is shaping up to be not the Conservatives' second Michael Foot after all, but its first Neil Kinnock.

"I even get nightmares about the bad reviews," he confesses. "One or two people have already tried to put the boot in. They know who they are. And more importantly, I know who they are." And, no doubt, where they live.

Dear, dear, whoever had Mr Jones down as one of those hyper-sensitive showbiz types of whom Stephen Fry remarked, in relation to a nasty Press, "they cry, you know. They do cry"? Or, in this case, "they come round your manor and give you a sortin', you know. They do come round your manor ..."

For myself, I am an admirer of Mr Jones. Anyone bereft of any shred of talent for football or acting who can make a living at both must have something going for him. While his Hollywood career may not sparkle as brightly as the hype suggests (Gone in Sixty Seconds was not the name of the Nick Cage vehicle he appeared in, as some believe, but the screenwriter's advice on Mr Jones's speaking part), he does get to envelope some pretty big names in bear-like hugs laced with false bonhomie.

So good luck to him as he strives against those evil critics. And if there is something a bit pantomime about the sub, sub, sub-Mad Frankie Fraser threats of retribution, there's no harm in that. You could even call it method acting. Panto, after all, is where Mr Jones will meet his destiny soon enough.

But rather than resent the BBC's eagerness for a change, he should be on his knees with gratitude. To have such a magnificent run in so brutal a business is quite something. To leave before the waning of his powers becomes horribly apparent is something else.