No point trying to trash Major government's record, combative Clarke warns Duncan Smith

Kenneth Clarke, the former Chancellor, issued a strong warning to Iain Duncan Smith not to "trash" the Major government yesterday as he ruled out standing for the Tory leadership during this Parliament.

In his most outspoken criticism this week of the current Conservative leader, Mr Clarke told The Independent's fringe meeting that Mr Duncan Smith was wrong both to follow Tony Blair's stance on Iraq and to attack the record of the last Tory government.

With Conservative strategists gambling the party's recovery at the party conference on an appeal to the "unfinished Thatcher revolution", Mr Clarke undermined that key message by cautioning that Mrs Thatcher had left behind a "pretty appalling economic situation".

Mr Duncan Smith made a deliberate attack on Mr Major's government at the weekend, in effect disowning its litany of scandals, sleaze and lack of reform and coming close to saying that it deserved to be kicked out by Labour in 1997.

Speaking alongside John Bercow, the shadow Work and Pensions Minister, the man whom Mr Duncan Smith defeated in the Tory leadership race last year made clear that he was not prepared to see his record as Chancellor dismissed by the present leadership.

"I think that's a mistake, a serious mistake. One thing we were not trashed for in 1997 was our economic record. The economy may be the great strength of the Government at the moment, but it is not a ground from which we have ever been driven. I think the Major Government inherited a pretty appalling economic situation. We did actually leave things in quite the best state they have ever been left to the Labour Party in modern history," Mr Clarke said.

"The record of the Major government was good in parts. We mustn't go back to our old quarrels. Actually, in that 18 years, we were a damned good government overall. If we stop believing that we will have no confident basis for changing ourselves and modernising ourselves and being a damned good government again."

Although Mr Duncan Smith seized an opportunity in Edwina Currie's revelations of her affair with Mr Major to distance himself completely from the early 1990s, Mr Clarke took a different view. "The political significance of last week's revelations was zilch. People are not changing their vote out there, it has not wrecked our conference," he said.

"That could still be one of our issues. There's no point trying to trash the Major government's record at large. The thing we've got to try to trash, the thing that destroyed the Major government, was an air of civil war, sleaze, scandal."

But when asked if he would challenge Mr Duncan Smith for the leadership, Mr Clarke was adamant that he would not, although he did admit that his position remained one of "never say never".