POWER TO THE PEOPLE

Simon Heifer finds lain Duncan Smith

convinced that the Tories can win the trust of the nation

THE Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition looks intently at me across the spartan sitting-room of his constituency home in Chingford. We are talking, nine months into his unexpected leadership, about what he must do to win.

'I know what my party is. The trouble is, the British people came to see us as something else. One of the great success stories of modern politics was the way in which the leftwing press, including too often the broadcast media, led by the Labour party, succeeded in painting and caricaturing the Conservative party and putting us into a box. And the box was marked -Nasty, Extreme, Strange". I have to break us out of that.'

To say that the knives have come out for lain Duncan Smith would be wrong. Some never put them away in the first place; others, dismissive at first, have come to respect the persistence of a patently decent man trying to do one of the worst jobs in Britain. Yet from some quarters, not least from the Right of his party, the rumblings are becoming louder. There are no clear signs of policy. The open goal that a dishonest and incompetent government has exposed is not, they say, being attacked. The opposition seems as obsessed with style as is the government, and Mr Duncan Smith is a man of sound instincts who, they say, finds himself forced to suppress them so as not to appear 'Nasty, Extreme, Strange'.

'If we were to be fair,' he says, 'we'd go back to all the times the Conservatives were in opposition and see how that charge was levelled at Mrs Thatcher, and how it was even levelled at Churchill. From the time she was elected, right up until 197S, she was roundly scorned by the press on the grounds that she was ineffective. I have to live in a world that says the opposition doesn't exist.'

He knows that Mr Blair still has some public appeal. 'They bought the lie that this guy was a conservative, and that they could live with him even if he was in the wrong party. We have to get all those people back — about another 9 or 10 per cent in the polls. We have to change those people's view of us. The view they have dates back to 1997. It is quite breathtaking. After five years of this government, you would expect

that they must have forgotten about that.' He insists that 'Ifs a policy-based campaign. The first part of it is to focus on the government's failure. First describe the problem. Then make the problem clear to the public. Then show that there's a way out of that problem.' We are still somewhere between phase one and phase two.

I say that many feel he is suppressing his instincts. 'They're wrong. Of course people will tell me not to follow my instincts. That's the nature of politics. If people want me to be somebody else, then they're dealing with the wrong man. I got elected to the leadership on this strategy. I said that under me the party would campaign on the public services. We had to get back on the quality-of-life issues that dominate everybody's lives.

'Everything else follows from there. You can talk about tax reduction when you know what you're going to do about the health service, when you know what you're going to do about education. You can't do it before, because you're not credible. If I went out tomorrow and talked about tax reduction, the public would say, "There you go again, they're not credible." Logically, you talk about the money second.'

His vision is called 'help the vulnerable'. He talks of how wealthier people can choose private health or private schools; but 'the people who are hurt are those on low and marginal incomes who don't have the power to choose.' This touchy-feely rhetoric again prompts consideration of his instincts and values. He protests that 'My party stands for the values it has always stood for. It believes that people make the best decisions when they control their own lives, and that society generally is better if people are left to get on with their lives. Smaller government makes bigger people. It believes in this nation. It believes in this country.'

While Tory policy on social matters is now 'inclusive', Mr Duncan Smith still reveres 'the married family'. 'We all know that structure is a bedrock on which all society can operate. Without it you have a form of anarchy.' However — and this is the sort of thing that his right-wing critics dislike — he is keen to qualify this. 'Balancing that against letting people make a choice is a key process. What you mustn't do is anything to damage that structure, but there will be people out there who will choose different lifestyles.'

I press him on his view of the govern ment's record in this area. 'It has pursued a casual agenda progressively to hit at the structure, such as in the ending of the married couple's allowance. What they have done is not to promote any particular lifestyle, but to demote an important structure. Bit by bit, year by year, they just load more burdens and more difficulties on it.' He takes as another example the recent announcement that contraceptives would be available in schools. 'They didn't stop to ask themselves the question: what effect does this have on the overall structure, on parental responsibility?' He sees this as a result of one of his bugbears: centralisation. 'Decisions must be taken further down; power's got to go out of Whitehall.' However, he is also at pains to emphasise how Torch, the Tory homosexual pressure group, supports him on this: 'They are very strong on maintaining strong families.'

Asked about the NHS, he won't rule out privatisation of some of its services.

He is travelling widely to look at other systems. 'I've learnt a hell of a lot about where we've gone wrong. When we bring forward policies, they will be based on policies that have worked in practice elsewhere. But the second thing is that we will take the British people with us on the journey. They do understand that out there nobody else does it like this, that out there everybody else gets better treatment.'

He is most attracted by what he has seen in Stockholm. 'They had our health system. They chucked buckets of money at it. When I went over there they said. "Long waiting-lists, dirty hospitals, we had all that." They removed politicians from boards. privatised a hospital, gave patients the absolute right to choose — if an ambulance turns up, you tell it where you want to be taken.' He wants to devolve power to local hospitals, and have them, not Whitehall, set targets in accordance with local demands. 'I'm not saying copy a particular model. I'm saying that if you give the people who run these things the power to make decisions, and take the politicians out, you get an immediate improvement, 'We need to increase the amount of healthcare available. If you look at Germany and France they have much greater use of the voluntary and private sectors. We've got to he far less ideological about this.' I ask him when we can expect some detail. 'Timing is wholly to do with when I believe the public is ready for it, and when I believe the public recognises the true extent of the problem. You can only deliver to the public what they are ready and willing to accept.'

We move on to crime. He promises that 'By the end of the year, we will be ready to come back to the problem and to start describing the key elements of what we would do that is so different. By that stage, Blunkett will have blustered himself almost into a box.' He says that forcing political correctness on to the police is 'part of the problem, but the problem is even deeper than that, The police themselves are utterly demoralised.' Under the influence of the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, he is moving towards the wholehearted endorsement of a policy of zero tolerance.

'Until the forces of law and order repossess the streets, then the ordinary, decent people who make up the vast majority themselves lose the streets and cannot live decent lives. Away from the chattering classes people have lost the streets and are scared, and are scared for their children; and what we learnt from New York is that there's no substitute for saying, "You are breaking the law, you cannot have your space here," ' Asked again when we can expect some detail, he answers that 'Timing is everything. There's no point in our just screaming and shouting as we have sometimes in the past. . . . I don't want us to shout any longer, I want us to do what we believe to be right.

'I want people to feel easier about us, to feel that being a Conservative is not something you hide; that being a Conservative is a natural process, because those who are publicly conservative are decent people who are rather like them.' He dismisses the recent self-flagellation of Francis Maude and the 'progressive' pressure group Cchange. 'I personally believe that the party I lead is a decent party full of decent people, and if there are people who are indecent and beyond the pale, then I have demonstrated that I will act very hard and very quickly on those people. But I don't want to spend my time insulting the party. If the public are to believe in us, they must get the sense that we believe in ourselves.'

We run through his other priorities. On education, he wants an end to the 'two-tier system that is failing inner-city schools': that is to be the Tories' next great campaign. On transport, he says that 'We have to be on the side of those who want to use their cars. On pensions, he indicates that the government's ill-judged removal of the dividend tax credit is up for review.

He seems tired — he doesn't seem to fit in much sleep these days — but confident. '1 think that I'm growing into the job all the time. No one is ever there, ready, tailor-made as a leader. I'm learning what works and doesn't work; what plays for me.' What about his perceived lack of charisma? 'People talk about charisma, and I say, well, if what you want is charisma, go and find an actor.' Remembering the Prime Minister, he adds, 'Actually, you've got an actor at the moment, 'Blair and his government have a fatal flaw. They are essentially a deceitful government. They are people who do not understand the difference between integrity and spin. They've lost sight of what it means to be a politician who actually believes in straight talking.... Power itself has no purpose. It's what you do with it that matters. I want people to look at me, and believe ultimately that if I say something I mean it.'

I ask him about the attack on him for educating his children privately. 'I know one thing. I know human nature, There's not a parent out there who wouldn't say that "The number one priority is my children, and I will do whatever I physically can to get them the best in life", and I'm no different from anyone else.' As for Mrs Blair, 'I think if she makes pronouncements that are political, then it's fair game to say that she's right or wrong; but I would never attack her personally.' Is Mrs Duncan Smith planning a foray into politics? 'No.'

Does he expect a referendum on the euro? 'This is the most difficult question that anyone ever asks me, because I have to get inside the head of the Prime Minister, and it's difficult to find which one he's wearing that day. If it's the head marked "I believe in the euro", then it's yes. If it's the head marked "I believe in power", the answer's probably no. If it's the head marked "I hate Gordon Brown", it could be almost anything. He can't make his mind up. Either way, think that he's a coward.'

We conclude on an uncomplacent note. 'We still have a long way to go to regain our credibility. I can't tell you enough that the most damaging thing for us was when we crashed out of the ERM. We lost credibility.' Though the details of how this is to he done are thin on the ground, he promises a process of 'slowly unpacking policy'. He is determined to defeat 'a government that in every respect is very alien to the way the British people run their lives'. He has taken a gamble, though: that the gradualist strategy works before his party and the electorate become tired of waiting for the opposition to happen.

Simon Heifer is a Daily Mail columnist.