Tory leader claims Lib Dems are too divided to ever seize power
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Your support makes all the difference.Iain Duncan Smith unleashed a vitriolic attack on Charles Kennedy yesterday, describing the Liberal Democrat leader as "boring" and his party as being "in complete schism".
A day after Mr Kennedy claimed that the Tories were irrelevant and redundant, Mr Duncan Smith hit back by claiming that the Liberal Democrats were split between left and right-wingers.
At the end of a two-day strategy meeting of the Shadow Cabinet, the Conservative leader said that his party was the "real Opposition" and dismissed as nonsense Mr Kennedy's claim that he would be in government by 2007.
He seized on reports in the past week that there was now a clear divide within the Liberal Democrats between those who wanted to use private finance for public services to attract Tory voters and the more traditional left of the party.
"The Liberal Democrats are in complete schism. One group want to go in one direction and another in another direction. If this was my party or the Labour Party it would be big news," Mr Duncan Smith said. "Their objective is not to get into government, their objective is to save their skins and get another MP. What they are engaged in is some cynical game of politics."
The Liberal Democrats are bound to seize on Mr Duncan Smith's remarks as evidence that he has been rattled, but he insisted that he had not even listened to Mr Kennedy's conference speech this week. "I never listen to Kennedy – he's too boring," he said.
Referring to his party's new approach to public services, Mr Duncan Smith added: "If he wants to take me on on this stuff, then that's fine because I will beat him every time."
With the Tory party conference scheduled to start in Bournemouth next month, the two-day Shadow Cabinet meeting at the Donnington Valley Hotel was attended by all 26 members of the Shadow Cabinet and 10 senior policy staff from Conservative Central Office.
In a special session on polling, Rick Nye, the director of research, told the meeting that it was a myth that the party was still "flatlining". Both internal and external ICM polls showed that the party had cut Labour's lead from 17 points when Mr Duncan Smith took over to just five points today.
A senior aide said that the difficulties of July and August, when David Davis was fired as party chairman, had not seriously affected the polls and that there had been "steady improvement" in the past year.
Tory officials promised that "modest" policy announcements on youth crime, welfare and inner-city schools could be expected at the party conference.
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