Senior Tory warns party has no hope of power

A former member of Iain Duncan Smith's shadow cabinet launched a blistering attack on the party leadership yesterday, warning that the Conservatives' chances of winning the next general election were "about as great as that of finding an Eskimo in a desert".

John Bercow, the former shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, said Mr Duncan Smith had the leadership "on leasehold, not freehold", adding: "the vultures are circling".

He told GMTV: "I have every hope that progress can be made, but I make no bones about the fact that as things stand we are doing badly and Iain is in considerable trouble. Frankly, at the moment, the opinion polls are ... horrifying for us. We seem to be holed below the waterline," he said.

Mr Bercow rounded on his former colleagues in the shadow Treasury team, condemning the handling of the party's new emphasis on tax cuts as "a sorry saga of ineptitude". He warned that Mr Duncan Smith was in danger of fighting the next election on a manifesto amounting to "a rather repetitive suicide note" by pandering to the party's right wing.

His comments will only add to the cold war within the party ranks. Conservative MPs are dismayed by their poor showing in the polls, while the former leadership contenders Kenneth Clarke and David Davis have refused to rule out fresh challenges if Mr Duncan Smith is ousted.

Mr Bercow, who resigned from the Shadow Cabinet over the leadership's opposition to gay adoption, said the issue had cost the Conservatives dear. He said: "We have to relegate to the dustbin of history the finger-wagging tendency in our party, which is inclined to want to tell people how to live their lives. That is not acceptable in modern Britain.

"We cannot afford to panic, to make a simple pitch for the core vote and thereby to pen a rather repetitive suicide note. That was the trap into which the Conservative Party fell in the last Parliament."

Mr Bercow said he wanted the party to break with its past position and support the abolition of Section 28 of the Local Government Act, which forbids the promotion of homosexuality by local authorities.

"I would hope that, after the damaging debacle that we suffered towards the end of last year on the subject of adoption by unmarried couples, the party will have learnt a lesson from that."

Asked about the prospects of a leadership challenge to Mr Duncan Smith, he said: "I don't want it to happen. I want Iain to succeed ... but we do have to make progress."

He added: "I am telling you honestly what everybody is saying privately: we are in trouble, we have got to get out of trouble. That means positive, dynamic, purposeful leadership. That's what we are looking to see."

A New Year message from Mr Duncan Smith claimed the party was "on the long road back to electoral victory", while Tim Yeo, the shadow Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, said 2003 was a "make-or-break" year for the party. But a succession of polls have offered little hope.

A poll in The Times today indicates that the Tories have not benefited from Labour's increasing unpopularity. Of those questioned, 32 per cent said they would vote Tory. This is unchanged while the Liberal Democrats have risen six points to 25 per cent.