GET THE GIRLS IN THE CLUB

lain Duncan Smith talks to Peter °borne

about his first 100 days and his plans for the future

'JOLLY nice of you to see The Spectator,' I said while shaking hands with lain Duncan Smith. We were in a cosy, oak-panelled room. It was just before Christmas and outside it was freezing cold. Duncan Smith is well-built and slightly taller than you might imagine from television, He wears the same regulation outfit favoured by the Prime Minister and his most senior Labour Cabinet ministers: dark, immaculately pressed suit, smartly ironed white shirt and carefully chosen tie. The shoes are beautifully polished. Friends who were with him in the army and have bumped into him since say that he has 'a lot more steel' about him now than then.

'Delighted,' replied Duncan Smith. 'I'd do anything to please my backbenchers.' After this agreeable exchange I asked him to assess his achievements during the 100 days or so that have elapsed since his election as Tory leader on 13 September. 'I'm always slightly cautious about these things. I'm not given to an over-jubilant response, and prefer to see the problems rather than the successes.

'We've got to get the party organised and refocused, move it into opposition and also move it on to policy. We've started that; we've got the framework in place. I've got the committees moving. I've got the policy forum. All that stuff is happening, so the energy is beginning to move through the system,' he proclaimed. 'We are where we would like to have been by Christmas. 'And we need a change of tone. It is not the message alone; it's the way you say it that matters, so let's get off the hectoring and shouting and let's get on to the calm, measured responses. Let's say so when the government does something right. We don't want to get trapped into opposing stuff simply because we have to. Every thing in opposition should be thought through in terms of where it takes us in policy terms, so that everything is joined up. I'd rather miss out on getting a headline now and wait until we've got the alternative in place.

'As the Republicans pointed out to me when we were in America, the Conserva

tives too often tell the world what they hate. We should learn to say the positive things. We have to get the tone right so that we don't sound like a strange breed of people from another planet. So that after a while, when the voters listen to us, they say, yeah, that does sound sensible to me.... '

Back on 13 September, harsh words were uttered about Duncan Smith's choice of front-bench team. His shadow Cabinet was held to represent a catastrophic lurch to the Right that made William Hague look like a representative of the soggy

Centre. 'I like to think,' says the Tory leader, 'that the judgment I made at the time has been borne out by their performance. The appointment of Oliver Letwin as Home Secretary was highly criticised, but I saw him as an excellent foil against David Blunkett. I looked at Gordon Brown and saw that he had eaten too many opposition spokesmen and wanted somebody who was a very good prosecutor of a case.' Duncan Smith rattles through various other names before alighting unprompted on the most controversial appointment of the lot. 'My appointment of Bill Cash was heavily criticised. But here is a man who is one of the foremost experts in constitutional law and

is actually proving it. Over the last few weeks he has confounded the government because he has spotted failures in their legislation, He really is working like a Trojan. They all are.'

I ask about Ken Clarke and whether he would be welcome back sometime in the Duncan Smith Cabinet. Tye had a lot of conversations with Ken since, mostly about health. Here is a man who is a Conservative and wants the Conservatives to succeed. He wants to help, 'I'm very happy to have people like Ken much more involved. I want the party to come together again. We need the various traditions that come from Ken.'

At the time of the leadership election over the summer, Duncan Smith, of all the five candidates, gave every appearance of being the one most stuck in the backwoods and hostile to constructive engagement with the modern world. But it is striking how much he has taken on board the modernisation agenda associated with Michael Portillo. The day I went to see him he had hinted, in an interview with the Radio Two disc jockey Steve Wright, that he felt that the term 'Tory' was 'old-fashioned', I asked what all this was about. Duncan Smith's answer was intriguing. 'Tory is a word of 18th-century origin,' he said. 'It is an old word, and it is a harsh word which sends a hard message. "Conservative" is a more appealing and inclusive word. We actually are called the Conservative party, and that is the wording that is used on all our press releases. People are going to go on calling us Tories, and I accept that — even though the BBC doesn't call Labour socialist any more — but I feel more at home thinking of us as Conservatives.'

Duncan Smith's ready acceptance of a 'modernising' Portillista agenda is true in terms both of personnel — 'The biggest winners in my shadow Cabinet were those who backed Portillo,' says Duncan Smith, 'while the biggest losers were probably the ones who backed me' — and of measures.

So I asked him whether he is to take up the invitation to become a member of the Carlton Club. Every Conservative party leader since the middle of the 19th century has been a member of this celebrated, though hidebound, institution, still occupying grand premises in St James's. Some of the great events in Conservative party history — notably the 1922 coup that deposed Lloyd George — took place within its walls. The club refuses to give full membership rights to women. William Hague was ready to overlook this foible. Duncan Smith is not. 'By no means am I trying to tell them how to run their club. I don't care what private clubs do. That's for them to decide and I'm not going to interfere in that. But this invitation comes to me because of what I am rather than to me personally; as the leader of a Conservative party that believes that there should be no "no-go" areas for women, I will have to say that I can't do it while it is different for many of my colleagues here who would like to become members but cannot.'

Duncan Smith insists, 'I'm not going to make any demands. I personally hope that the club does take women but it's up to them to decide.'

It seems important to test what Duncan Smith plans to retain as he takes the Conservative party into the 21st century, so I ask him what Conservatism means for him. He reveals that the Conservatives are 'going to set down a statement of beliefs for front-benchers that is our benchmark. There is our sense that it is right to trust people to make the judgment about how they live. No freedom is absolute — one man's freedom is another man's tyranny — hut our instinctive judgment and values must be that people run their lives better than the government does. When the government intervenes to solve a short-term problem.' he expands, 'it may solve that problem but create bigger problems, and one of those problems is dependency and obligation. Government should recognise that it can't solve every problem. When government is big, people are small.'

I asked him who his Conservative party heroes are. He cited, first, Pitt the Younger: 'It was long before the party was officially started. He's the one who essentially founded the Conservative party as the party that believes in the country, the nation in accountability and small government.' He then moved on to Disraeli: 'The clever man who put together the final blueprint for what really was the Conservative party.' 'Studying Disraeli,' muses Duncan Smith, 'explains to us how you bring in people who have never seen the party as their natural home. He teaches us that it is how you speak and what you talk about that brings those people in. He embraced new groups of the population, which is what the Tory party always does when it comes back into power. That's what Thatcher did in 1979; she showed that we cared more about them than anybody else.'

Duncan Smith ranged over many other issues: the health service, Britishness, the strategic dilemmas facing Tony Blair. While no intellectual, he is always capable of casting fresh light on a subject. There is no room, unfortunately, to share that light more broadly here because of the need to deal with the famous frog in the Duncan Smith throat. 'The sketchwriters seem to have settled on this as an important point,' he says. 'I think it says a lot about how the way we view politics at the moment has become so superficial.

'What happened is this. I haven't had a break since last Christmas. I did 110 constituencies during the election when I was speaking up and down the country for William to large groups, I then went straight. into the leadership election, and I went up and down the country, four to five meetings a day, 500 to 1,000 people, often without microphones, systems that didn't work, a number of occasions in the open air when I was shouting for 45 minutes to an hour in answer to questions. What happened is, to put it frankly, that I damaged my vocal cords, and the best way to put it right was to stop talking. I saw the doctor, and he said that it was the usual old story. What I had is

what pop singers have when they overreach themselves. Your vocal cords just stop working in quite the way that they would, that's all.' He will be taking two weeks oft over Christmas and the New Year.