The deposing of Mr Davis is fraught with danger

Should Duncan Smith be deemed to have failed after the next election, Davis will be ready and waiting

Phil Edgar Jones, the executive producer of the Channel 4 Big Brother shindig, was asked this week if he was considering an offshoot featuring real live politicians. The idea, he said, was not as ludicrous as it sounds. "We have talked about it."

Perhaps he might start with all members of the Shadow Cabinet so that the public – "you decide" – can make up its own mind on who has been bitching to whom about the state of the relationship between Iain Duncan Smith and David Davis.

Whether Mr Davis, the outgoing Conservative Party chairman, has been evicted or merely moved sideways is not difficult to decide. True, he is still in the Shadow Cabinet, with his battered pride protected to some extent by the fig leaf of shadowing the Deputy Prime Minister.

Party officials are billing his marking of John Prescott as "a battle of the big bruisers". Certainly there is a real job to shadow, now that Mr Prescott has the political battlegrounds of local government, housing and the regions. If Mr Davis forgets his injured pride and knuckles under, he could still make a name for himself in this important area. It is, anyway, to his credit that he has not walked off in a huff, and a sign of his maturity in putting party before self.

But it is clear that the eviction of Mr Davis from the Big Tory House at Central Office leaves the scope for the press to replace "Jade rows with Alex" headlines with real-life headlines screaming "Tories in turmoil again and still at war". Mr Davis's wings, temporarily at least, have been severely clipped, and he does not even have Mr Prescott's title of Deputy Leader. That remains with Michael Ancram, who continues as Shadow Foreign Secretary.

Clearly there have been strains for some weeks in the relationship between Mr Davis and Mr Duncan Smith – egged on by former supporters of Michael Portillo, who have the best interests of neither at heart. Gremlins in the engine room at Central Office – possibly led by the chief executive, Mark Macgregor – as well as tearoom tittle-tattle in the Commons, have taken their toll and caused, unnecessarily, the seeds of mutual mistrust to be sown. Mr Davis has paid a heavy price for being away on his Florida holiday.

But the relationship between party leader and party chairman – especially when the Tories are in opposition – has to be one of total unity and loyalty at all times. This really is a relationship where there can be no room for even a cigarette paper between them.

I was hopeful last year that this combination of these two leadership rivals would work. Mr Duncan Smith owed Mr Davis a debt for delivering the crucial votes of MPs who had supported the latter, ensuring that Mr Duncan Smith defeated Michael Portillo. Mr Duncan Smith then went on to defeat Kenneth Clarke in the wider poll of the party members, and Mr Davis was duly rewarded.

There has always been a suspicion that Mr Davis has had an agenda of his own to succeed Mr Duncan Smith, but I am not convinced of this. As party chairman it is impossible to be divorced from the fate of the leader. Indeed, no party chairman has ever become party leader. If anything, however, Mr Davis could now become an even more likely focus for leadership speculation, although his popularity among MPs is lower than it is among party workers.

Should Mr Duncan Smith be deemed to have failed after the next election, Mr Davis will be there ready and waiting – subject, of course, to his successfully defending his marginal seat of Haltemprice and Howden, where his majority of 17,000 in 1992 slumped to 1,900 over the Liberal Democrats last year. If he had remained as chairman, however, he would have borne the brunt of the blame for an election defeat along with the leader.

On the other hand, Mr Duncan Smith has shown that he is a formidable butcher, and not frightened of wielding the axe to get his way. He has clearly been unhappy at the slow pace of change in getting a wider variety of candidates selected. But he has bought more of the Portillo/Francis Maude modernising agenda with him than Mr Davis was prepared to contemplate. On the ground, however, it should not be forgotten that, of the 20 marginal Labour-held constituencies that have so far selected Tory candidates, six have chosen women. Mr Davis may not have held with all-women shortlists, but he has actually delivered at the grassroots.

So what do we make of Theresa May, the new woman of the moment? She would not have been my first choice - I would have preferred the current Vice-Chairman, Gillian Shephard, who has cabinet experience and is popular among the troops. Mrs May has risen fast, making history by becoming the first woman party chairman after only five years in Parliament. Her appointment apparently signals Mr Duncan Smith's commitment to the selection of more women, black, Asian and gay candidates – although it is unclear, yet, whether this will be done by imposition or by persuasion.

It can be argued that it was on Mrs May's watch as Transport spokesman that Stephen Byers was felled. But there were criticisms that her Commons speeches sometimes missed their target and that it was ultimately the press, rather than opposition politicians, that killed Mr Byers' career. Whether she will be as successful as Mr Davis in handling the Today programme and a hostile media will also be a challenge. On the other hand, we should not forget the famous quote by Margaret Thatcher about the difference between male and female politicians. "If you want a good speech made, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman."

Mrs May will need all her feminine wiles to fend off the natural inertia of Central Office that has, for years, harboured a nest of vipers. Frankly, its structure has long been in need of reform. Professionals who are upset by the ways of a new broom simply stall and engage in whispering campaigns in the certain knowledge that no chairman seems to last more than a couple of years. (Mrs May, incidentally, also needs to watch her own backyard, in Maidenhead, where her 1997 majority of 12,000 over the Liberal Democrats slumped last year to just over 3,000 – an 8 per cent swing to the Lib Dems, who have got their beady eye on her.)

For the rest of this reshuffle, it is largely a case of moving around the deckchairs. John Whittingdale at Trade and Industry goes to Culture, Media and Sport in a straight swap with Tim Yeo. Hardly likely to get the juices flowing among voters. Tim Collins, a sparky, overgrown excitable Tory boy – precisely what the party is not looking for in its candidates – is the new whizz kid to face Alistair Darling at Transport.

In opposition, a reshuffle is one of the few opportunities to focus public and media attention on a political party deprived on so many occasions of the oxygen of publicity. This was billed as a "modest restructuring", but it will get big headlines for the perception it creates of rows between top Tories. The last 10 months of steady progress have been free of civil-war headlines. Mr Duncan Smith has taken a big risk in reigniting those stories. And we have not heard the last of Mr Davis.

mrbrown@pimlico.freeserve.co.uk