The Tories turn on each other

Public-sector workers striking, state pensions threatened, stock market in freefall and the Labour party haemorrhaging membership. It's the kind of political advantage most parties would kill for. So what do the Tories do? They kill each other.

In time-honoured tradition, when the going gets really tough for Tony Blair, the Tories get tough with each other.

Less than a year in to his leadership, Iain Duncan Smith was told by his party Left to sack his chairman David Davis. Late last night he did just that.

The ham-fisted reshuffle, clumsily leaked then hastily brought forward to today, saw the former chairman humiliatingly demoted to a menial shadow cabinet role.

The only question now being asked is why Davis took the job. The reformed Portillistas - I think of them as the Slytherins, with due apologies to Harry Potter - had mounted a skillful smear campaign worthy of New Labour against Davis via secret briefings to the media. He stands accused of blocking the Portillista inclusive agenda and failing to force constituency parties to select more women, black and Asian candidates. He has been attacked for taking a holiday whose timing he cleared with Duncan Smith because the Tory leader is taking the whole of August off.

The Slytherins warned Duncan Smith that either the chairman went, or he did.

Davis is the rarest of Tory politicians - charismatic, passionate and down to earth. The son of a single parent, raised on a council estate, he is a credible champion of the public-service reform agenda and therefore a real danger to the Left. But behind his back, shadow cabinet members have been openly depicting Davis as "the ugly, uncaring face of Conservatism" in an attempt to smear him. This was in response to Davis's refusal to accept the Portillo/Maude "inclusive" agenda - strong on language, mood and style and short on principle and policy. Davis prefers to concentrate on reform of public services - not on appearance and spin.

Desperate to get a woman or an ethnic minority MP in as chairman, the reformers have been promoting former cabinet minister Gillian Shephard and shadow international development spokesman Caroline Spellman. There are no Tory Asian or black MPs. The other name being pushed by some of the Slytherins is former Portillo supporter Bernard Jenkin. Also wielding the dagger has been shadow cabinet member David - two brains, no common sense - Willetts. If this man is to be a standard bearer of normalness, God help us all.

What we are witnessing here is a rerun of the early Hague years - minus the baseball cap.

It is forgivable to make mistakes. What is unforgivable is not to learn from them. The last time a new, inexperienced leader of the Tory party sprinted off on a modernising agenda, Hague left behind his core supporters. Two years into office, he looked around and they were gone, sacrificed on the altar of inclusiveness. When he then tried to reconnect with them, he was seen to be "lurching to the Right".

All this latest push from the Tory Left succeeds in doing is confirming in the public mind that this is a nasty party, full of back-stabbing, vicious, selfish middle-aged white men. With exquisite irony, each attempted coup shatters the one quality the Slytherins say must be displayed if the Tories are ever to return to office - niceness.

With every crude attempt to appear normal and nice, these people become more ludicrous. Their pursuit of niceness is like Michael Jackson's pursuit of whiteness: everything they do to try and become that which they are not makes them slightly more grotesque.

Iain Duncan Smith has, unwittingly, been co-opted by them - and completely out-manoeuvred. The Slytherins have put a May local election deadline on poll recovery next year as a condition of Duncan Smith's survival. This is not achievable and they know it.

If he refused to sack Davis and the polls didn't shift, they would say Duncan Smith was to blame and must go. Now he has sacked the chairman, and when there is no May poll recovery, they will say it is all down to Duncan Smith's leadership and he has to go. A classic trap.

Supporters of Davis have been urging him to resign and leave Duncan Smith to the hands of the Slytherins rather than be blamed for the impending disaster. Free from the strictures of office, Davis would have been free to launch a leadership challenge from the backbenches at a later date. And, in the end, who could blame him? Given time, he would make a formidable opponent - and may yet still.

Amanda Platell was William Hague's head of press.