Tories hear wit and wisdom of man wot won it

The affairs of the Conservative Party may lately have come to resemble the Palace of Varieties, but few acts could ever top Kelvin at the Carlton Club.

Kelvin MacKenzie, the legendary former editor of the Sun, who delivered the blue-collar vote to the Tories at successive elections, appeared last night at the watering hole of high Toryism to tell the party "how they mismanaged media relations of the last election".

The Carlton was the venue for a Bow Group seminar on how William Hague can win back the right-wing press. Sharing the platform with Mr MacKenzie, managing director of Live TV!, were communications chiefs from Smith Square. The right-wing ideologue Michael Grove, the biographer of Michael Portillo, was in the chair.

Times have changed. Mr MacKenzie's former organ loudly supported Blairism at the last election after Rupert Murdoch's seeming conversion to new Labour, and officials at Conservative Central Office now privately acknowledge that they had been out-manoeuvred and outgunned by Labour.

Asked how he would revive the Tories' flagging publicity campaign, he said: "I would get the biggest poster site, put up there the fact that since Labour had been in power there has been 17 tax rises, three interest rate increases and three U-turns and there are four years and nine months to go. I would just keep on updating it."

Francis Halewood, the new head of communications at Tory Central Office, said that no amount of spin-doctoring could have won the election for the party. He agreed that trying to compete with Peter Mandelson's propaganda machine was "just a waste of money".

Mr Halewood added: "We should really have no policy for the next two years. Labour didn't. Things will change, things will evolve, there is no point in doing things which we may regret later." Mr MacKenzie did not hide his contempt for John Major. He recounted how on Black Wednesday the then Prime Minister telephoned and asked him how the Sun was going to "play the story".

Mr MacKenzie said: "I told him that I have got a big bucket of crap on my desk and we were going to pour it all over him for the next day's paper. "His response was 'Kelvin, you're such a wag.' I'm quite prepared to recount this tale in the future just to show what kind of man he was."

Michael Grove said the Tories had lost the election because they were deemed to be "arrogant, self-satisfied and full of internal divisions".

Mr MacKenzie began his address from a prepared text, but noticeably relaxed afterwards. One Bow Group member said later: "He's undoubtedly a highly intelligent man. I had preconceptions about him, but I must say I was impressed. I suspect he is quite ruthless, but this is the kind of person we need to grab the party by its genitals and turn it into a fighting force."

As the evening progressed an expansive Mr MacKenzie told the audience of around 60: "I have spent today with William Hague and his people, they said they'd been told by their PR men not to do or say anything and let Labour make mistakes. I think that is wrong, they must harry and attack them whenever possible." When asked what he thought about Mr Hague, Mr MacKenzie responded: "We run a television company and ITC rules forbid me from having any views about Mr Hague, that's just as well."