The Conservative fight-back finally got under way in Blackpool yesterday as Mr Iain Duncan Smith promised a tolerant and inclusive party at the cutting edge of innovation in Britain's public services.
An occasionally faltering delivery betrayed some of Mr Duncan Smith's nervousness in his first address to the Conservative conference as party leader. However, an overall performance judged solid and workmanlike saw the new leader take the first steps towards healing the wounds of this summer's leadership contest - and towards recasting his party's political agenda.
Modernising supporters of the defeated Michael Portillo warmed to Mr Duncan Smith's recognition that "women, ethnic minorities and people of different lifestyles" must be given greater opportunity in the party, and his pledge to be "intolerant of anyone who is intolerant of others".
At the other end of the Tory spectrum, Ms Ann Widdecombe described Mr Duncan Smith's speech as "very, very important" in laying the groundwork for the party's eventual reconnection with the people consigned to Britain's sink estates and schools.
The speech - connecting the themes of "insecurity" abroad and at home - contained all the patriotism and pride in service which conference and the watching media would have expected of the Tory soldier leader. And enough, just, to keep the party's Euro-sceptical juices flowing.
There was warm applause when Mr Duncan Smith lauded NATO and branded the so-called European army "dangerous", and again, later, when he confirmed his unyielding opposition to the European single currency in three short sentences: "We have been told that the course is now set for entry into the euro. As a party we will oppose that. Whenever the referendum comes we will fight to keep the pound."
The "clarity" of that position, he declared with evident cheer, meant they could instead concentrate "on the crisis in our hospitals, the failure in our schools and the crime on our streets, while others talk about a timetable for scrapping the pound." Heavily foretold, this stratagem for ending the party's perceived obsession with Europe carried no surprise. What might have surprised some, on the other hand, was the wholly unapologetic way in which Mr Duncan Smith invoked the European experience to indict Labour's handling of Britain's public services.
In one role-reversal of near-historic proportions (at least in Tory terms) Margaret Thatcher's successor-but-two called the French health minister to his aid to describe Britain's health service as "intolerable" and to declare: "The sad fact is this: a generation ago Britain was the sick man of Europe. Today Britain is the last place in Europe any man or woman would want to fall sick."
It was "shaming", he said, that "in our country the sick cannot get the treatment they need" while "in many of our inner cities the young do not receive the education they deserve." Simply put: "Our European neighbours enjoy better hospitals and schools because they put the needs of their people before the demands of dogma. If we are to live up to the demands of a new century we must do the same."
This, Mr Duncan Smith said, was now the Tory party's "greatest mission" on the home front in the coming years: "To assemble the coalition of charities and churches, the public and private sectors, that will deliver results."
As he confirmed he was sending his shadow ministers to other countries "to see why it is that their public services are so much better than ours", the Conservative leader vowed this would not be an entirely foreign adventure: "We will bring an open mind to the task of reforming public services - but we will also bring the best of British innovation, enterprise and energy to our task."
Not for them Labour's "ideological baggage the special favours for those who pay the political bills." The Conservatives' own experience told them people were no longer willing to put up with the services politicians handed out: "We are long past the age when everyone was willing to queue passively for treatment in a hospital corridor the way they queued at the bakers during the war. The gentleman in Whitehall no longer knows best and yet Labour still act as though they know better than we do."