The Conservatives show few signs of getting over their nervous breakdown

The Conservative party's identity crisis shows few signs of abating. Iain Duncan Smith protests that he has only been leader for a year, which is true but irrelevant, like much of what he says.

In his first year, he has repudiated William Hague's strategy of reinforcing the core Tory vote with an unlovely little-Englander hostility to foreigners and foreign money. And he has taken tentative steps towards a set of policies which learn from practical experience around the world. But no one is listening because none of it engages with anything the British people care about – or, at least, not in ways that differ greatly from the Government's approach.

Yesterday's "new" policies are mostly tinny echoes of or minor extensions to Labour ideas, such as "tough love" for young offenders and a state-backed lifelong savings account. Only the idea that parents of children in failing schools should be given the money to spend at private schools has the ring of radical individualism about it.

Mr Duncan Smith's failure to connect is quite an achievement because, although most people do not dislike the Labour government, they have plenty to complain about, and they hardly warm to the personality of the Prime Minister. But on the core issues of tax and individual liberty – on which the Blair government is vulnerable and will become more so – the Tories have failed to establish a brand image.

Kenneth Clarke, Mr Duncan Smith's rival for the leadership, makes some sharp observations in his interview with The Independent today. He anticipates this week's launch of a new health policy, which is intended to exploit the division between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown over independence for the best-performing hospitals by proposing that all hospitals should be freed from central control.

Mr Clarke also echoes the criticism made by Malcolm Rifkind of Mr Duncan Smith's performance in the debate on Iraq when parliament was recalled last month. Mr Rifkind, with the magisterial dismissiveness of a former Foreign Secretary, effectively said that Charles Kennedy for the Liberal Democrats had done a better job of asking the questions which tested the Prime Minister's case.

It is striking that Mr Duncan Smith has been unable to mobilise behind him any of the big Tory names. Mr Clarke, Mr Rifkind, Michael Portillo and William Hague – none of them even pretends to be on the IDS bandwagon. Yes, Mr Duncan Smith has not made Mr Hague's mistakes, but many Tories must look back quizzically at their last leader, who was at least a witty and effective public speaker.

Yesterday's ICM opinion poll, giving Labour a post-conference bounce back up to 43 per cent, with the Tories and Liberal Democrats tied on 24 per cent, is a sharp corrective to the view that Mr Duncan Smith was closing the gap on Mr Blair. It is just one poll, of course, but it adds strongly to the impression that the Conservatives are if anything going backwards.

The overwhelming impression given by the Conservatives is of a party still in the grip of a collective nervous breakdown that started with the trauma of Thatchercide in 1990. The idea put about by Mr Duncan Smith's officials that he is completing the Thatcher revolution after the betrayal of the Major years does not help to dispel that image.

Unless he can start this week to win the battle for relevance, he seems doomed to pursue the last-resort strategy of the unimaginative politician everywhere, of sitting tight and waiting for something to turn up.