Portillo pours salt into Tory party wounds

JOHN RENTOUL

Political Correspondent

Michael Portillo, the right-wing Secretary of State for Defence, blew apart the Prime Minister's attempt to hold his party together yesterday, when he provoked Conservative moderates by appearing to welcome Emma Nicholson's defection to the Liberal Democrats.

Mr Portillo, whose "xenophobic" Tory party conference speech in October was cited by Ms Nicholson as one of the causes of her departure, said: "If she wants a United States of Europe then of course she is right to leave the Conservatives, who are opposed to it."

Tory MPs who share Ms Nicholson's pro-European views were incensed. "I am very surprised that of all people the Government should put up Michael Portillo - able as he is - on this particular issue. He represents to a very large extent the very worrying tilt to the right about which many of us are concerned," said Peter Temple-Morris, the One Nation Tory MP for Leominster and close associate of Ms Nicholson's until her defection last Friday.

He just stopped short of calling for Mr Portillo to be sacked. "I wouldn't like to see anyone leave the Cabinet, I would just like them to behave as if they were one Cabinet, visibly for all to see," Mr Temple-Morris said.

A spokeswoman for Conservative Central Office said Mr Portillo's interview with the BBC's Today programme, by telephone from the Arabian Gulf, had not been arranged through the office.

The reopening of the left-right split made an inauspicious start to the New Year for John Major, who had hoped last year's leadership election would end the infighting. Ms Nicholson's defection and the squabbling it has provoked only underlined the tenuousness of his grip on power. Ministers accept that the Government is likely to lose its Commons majority during the year. But the Prime Minister has vowed to fight on, and Tory sources claim the Government may continue into 1997 so long as it avoided giving the Ulster Unionists specific reasons for voting it down.

With the Tories' Commons majority now vulnerable to just two deaths or defections - after expected Tory defeats in two by-elections due by March - MPs' telephones hummed with speculation yesterday as to the identity of the "six or seven" who might follow Alan Howarth and Ms Nicholson across the floor of the House.

As Mr Major slid further into the arms of the Ulster Unionists, Cardinal Cahal Daly, leader of Ireland's Catholics, issued a warning plea to him not to allow parliamentary arithmetic to hold up the Northern Ireland peace process. "It would be most unfortunate if any plausibility were given to the suspicion [that] the peace in Northern Ireland would be allowed to suffer because of internal political difficulties at Westminster," he said.

If Mr Major could deliver a lasting peace, it "would ensure his place in history", Dr Daly said. But he entered political controversy by urging all-party talks without waiting for the IRA to agree to start handing in its weapons. "There is now an urgent need to move into inclusive political talks. I believe that prolonged failure to do so is fraught with grave risks. It is more than high time now to see negotiations under way as soon as possible so that paramilitary weapons may be decommissioned as a concomitant and as a consequence of political progress," he said.

David Trimble, the Ulster Unionist Party leader, has maintained a discreet silence since Ms Nicholson's defection, but his security spokesman, Ken Maginnis, said the party would not bring the Government down "prematurely" - except on Northern Irish issues.

PM faces crisis, page 2

Leading article, page10