Sooner or later, the Tories will have to end their 'Trappist vow of silence'

The present Conservative treatment of Europe is, if not outright deceitful, at least wilfully misleading to the voters

Anyone reading some of what the former shadow Foreign Secretary Francis Maude has been writing and saying in recent weeks could be forgiven for asking why the Conservative Party has never considered changing its name. This isn't quite as outlandish an idea as it sounds. It certainly first occurred to Labour as long ago as 1959, when it had lost three elections in row and the late Douglas Jay suggested a name change as one of a series of reforms of the party's stance and image.

What's more, it's precisely the core of what the party's name means which Mr Maude spends quite a lot of time warning his party against, for example in a newspaper article yesterday. Having earlier urged the party not to "retreat further into a reactionary redoubt and try to hold the modern world at bay", he now says – disapprovingly – that "we tend to look back to some vanished age when 'things were better'''. And he remarks – rightly – that the very phrase "bring back..." is enough to ensure a rousing cheer at Tory conferences. What is that, if not Conservative, at least conservative?

This isn't at all to patronise or make light of what Mr Maude is trying to do with the new Tory organisation CChange whose inaugural meeting he chaired last night. Given the key role that Mr Maude and his allies, including Archie Norman and the ghost in the reformist machine, Michael Portillo, played in the leadership and programme which took the party to defeat in the last election, the new approach certainly reflects a spectacular conversion.

But so what? If you can't start to change your mind after a defeat on that scale when can you? What's more, most of what he argues is valuable. You only have to look at the Bush team, with a Secretary of State who is the son of a black immigrant, a National Security Adviser who is a woman, black and a possible second term running mate, to underscore his killer point that the 2001 Tory intake of MPs were "exclusively straight white males"; and that as with Labour, the centre may have to intervene if local parties can't or won't change this on their own. In a parliamentary party in which there are still more old Etonians than women, he is certainly right to complain of the still tangible rich, posh, public school stereotype of Toryism. As he is right to suggest that the Tories – whose leadership recently opposed the successful proposals for gay adoption – are at odds with the rest of society's "more relaxed approach" to gay people.

For a Conservative even to use the phrase "the assertive multiculturalism of younger Britain", as Mr Maude did yesterday without disapproval, is striking. It is, for example, a term the Spanish Prime Minister Jose-Maria Aznar, Tony Blair's closest ally on asylum and immigration, has said he dislikes. Culture, the subject of the CChange meeting last night, matters.

But substance matters too. Here it's worth going back to Mr Maude's RA Butler lecture last March, in which he touched tentatively on matters of policy as well as image. Some issues, like the fixation with policies designed to reinforce marriage, cover both. There was, for example, a perfectly respectable anti-statist, anti-social engineering case for supporting the erosion of tax differences between married and unmarried couples. But the present Conservative leadership's libertarianism – while striking on some law and order issues under Oliver Letwin – has eschewed it.

Again, a lot of what Mr Maude said last March was sensible. By implication he questioned whether the comfortingly vague idea of "social justice" need belong any more to the left than the right. The question here however is whether he was prepared to follow his own logic through to its conclusion. To take the single example of the NHS, Mr Maude argued that there was much less difference between the two parties than normally suggested. Here Mr Maude is surely describing the Tory party as he (now) wants it to be rather than as it is. The very reason that it is taking so long for the Opposition to come up with a health policy is precisely that it is still searching for an alternative system of funding which would treat the central principles of the NHS as obsolete.

But this is even truer on Europe. Mr Maude says – rightly – that the party should not only appear less xenophobic but should abandon its "Trappist vow of silence" on the great European issues of the day – a silence only broken when it has to be on occasions like yesterday when there is a Prime Ministerial statement. What he fails to say is that the present Tory treatment of Europe is, if not outright deceitful, at least wilfully misleading. Almost weekly, MPs' pagers resound with urgings not to comment on some European issue. This tacitly acknowledges that for all the public's practical reservations about the European Union, a policy of renegotiation which would surely and inexorably lead to withdrawal, and which would rule out euro-membership for all time, may look extreme and be electorally dangerous. The new answer therefore is not to change the policy but to conceal it. When Michael Portillo joins, as he did last weekend, those urging the Tories not to play a leading role in a "no" campaign against the euro he is only partially warning that Tory unpopularity might contaminate the antis' case. He is also implying that the Tories should not fall into the trap of giving their least popular policy too high a profile.

Of course it would be difficult for the present leadership to change the policy. It has been what has most sustained many of them, including Iain Duncan Smith, a leading former member of the withdrawalist Campaign Against a Federal Europe, in politics. It was urged on them repeatedly by their mentor Baroness Thatcher, or as Mr Maude euphemistically refers to her in his lecture "rumblings from our Hall of Fame".

But it remains a dark corner of the Tories' pitch to the electorate; it is as if Labour in the 1980s and early 1990s had decided not to change its policy on unions, or the bomb, but merely to stop talking about it. Mr Maude shows some subliminal signs of recognising this. Moreover there is an alternative. On the euro, for example, it could argue that entry should only be considered when it has passed the test of a recession as well as a boom. It's not opposition to entry now which switches off the electorate; it's a doctrinal objection to it under any circumstances.

One of the virtues of a Ken Clarke leadership would have been that he would have finally exorcised the ghost of Thatcher on this and other issues. He would have been the only leader since John Major not to have been anointed by her.

For now, that may be an irrelevant speculation. Mr Maude was careful yesterday in his coded message to say that Iain Duncan Smith was going in the right direction, though not fast enough. He is, meanwhile, saying some interesting things. What he doesn't yet address is the central question of whether his goals are achievable by this Tory leadership.

d.macintyre@independent.co.uk