Quiet man turns up the volume and the heat

If nothing else, then he will fight, fight and fight again for the party leadership he loves.

That much was clear from a speech a good deal more interesting for its content than its delivery. For while the quiet man may have turned up the volume, he was unable, for all his well-publicised voice coaching, wholly to banish the slow and insistent drone that tends to dog his platform performances. For his immediate purposes, that hardly mattered.

Iain Duncan Smith appears for now to be ignoring the regular advice he has been getting to broaden his appeal in the country by de-emphasising those stand-bys of the hard right, Europe and asylum, and moderate the language with which he attacks the opponents of conservatism. Instead, he is following the example of the Australian Premier, John Howard, whose deputy campaigns director, Lynton Crosby, recently visited the Shadow Cabinet by deploying a meaner, cheaper rhetoric.

Hence the jibe at Charles Kennedy's fondness for drink and the innuendo, cavalierly pre-judging the outcome of the Hutton inquiry, that Tony Blair was to blame for the death of David Kelly. Hence, too, a reference to the party's draconian asylum policy, which itself owes much to the Australian Mr Howard, in which he declared that: "While Mr Blair travels the world, the world is travelling here."

He ignored, too, the many voices saying he should not pledge tax cuts until he has persuaded the country that he has a plan for improving public services. Instead, he unashamedly put tax reductions at the heart of his agenda. An arresting set of radical, localising, policies on education began to emerge in Blackpool from some of his shadow ministers this week, along with a more coherent critique than in the past of the Blair Government and it's bureaucratic fixation with central directives.

But Mr Duncan Smith at times strained credulity when he described the travails of the country in terms more appropriate to a ravaged Germany in 1945 than a 2003 Britain, which for all it's problems and inequalities, enjoys broad stability and a strong economy.

For a man who reputedly proclaims truth telling to be his unique selling point, Mr Duncan Smith also stretched his attack on the imminent new European Union constitution to, and some would say well beyond, the absolute limit.

In the hall, this was no problem. True, the block of delegates round the central podium ostentatiously leading the standing ovations, were followed to their feet by the rest of the hall less frequently as the speech, some 15 minutes too long, wore on. But most delegates leaving the Winter Gardens appeared well pleased with his performance, and not only because they wanted to close ranks in the face of an excoriatingly critical press this week. For those beyond Blackpool, however, the effect may have been rather different. The unconscious echo of Hugh Gaitskell was unintentionally instructive. The Labour leader in 1960 had promised to fight, fight and fight again to save not the country he loved, as Mr Duncan Smith did yesterday when he underlined his passionate opposition to European integration, but to say his party, which had just approved a call for unilateral nuclear disarmament. Gaitskell was, in other words, pledging to reconnect his party with a wider public, switched off by its most unpopular policies.

In stark contrast, Mr Duncan Smith was fighting yesterday to reconnect himself with his party's core support in a speech which, for all his many professions of sympathy with the crime-afflicted and underprivileged sections of society, played almost all the tunes beloved of the Tories' hard, anti-European, tax cutting right. His declaration that "you either want my mission or you want Tony Blair" was a clear message to plotters that he will not go quietly, and a brutal and perhaps electorally catastrophic fight will be necessary to dislodge him.

This may work, at least for the foreseeable future - not that long, given the volatile state of British politics. This is not so much because of the speech. Rather, it's because doubts remain over whether the MPs who long for him to be replaced have the courage to put their names on the list needed to trigger a confidence vote. But his speech underlined a price the party will pay for not removing him, which goes beyond problems of manner and style: the more he has to shore up his support among the party faithful, the less he is going to be able to broaden his appeal beyond the hardcore devoted 2001 Tory. And that means the better it goes for the leader the worse it may be for the party.