BRITAIN: The departing Conservative Party leader faced Tony Blair for the last time yesterday. Frank Millar watched the proceedings in the Commons.
On the face of the plotters, only smiles. They had come to watch Iain Duncan Smith's last joust with Tony Blair at Prime Minister's Questions - a necessary and important parliamentary "event" before the resumption of business as usual.
Sitting immediately beside the departing Tory leader was Michael Howard, the man who hopes at noon today to make good his undisputed claim to the Tory crown. As he waited for Mr Speaker Martin to call the House to order, the great man had no further to look to know where treachery lay. Indeed if Mr Blair was still in doubt, Mr Duncan Smith would not depart the chamber without giving him fair notice.
For if Mr Howard has "something of the night about him", IDS - as he reminded the prime minister yesterday - has developed something of "a sixth sense" about leadership bids. All thought of himself and care for his position now gone, the demob-happy Duncan Smith was only too happy to bestow the wisdom and sage advice of the older-but-wiser statesman. And so, with a passing reference to Chancellor Gordon Brown, who is back from paternity leave, IDS gravely warned the prime minister to tread very, very carefully.
Mr Duncan Smith had won few (if any) rave reviews for these Wednesday sallies. But for sheer chutzpah, his last would almost certainly be described as a bravura performance.
Not that there had been much hint of it when he first rose to the despatch box. The welcoming (if ironic) "hear, hears" were conspicuously louder on the Labour side. Some of the suspected Tory assassins sitting behind Mr Duncan Smith thought this a suitable moment to inspect the Gothic splendour of the Commons' ceiling.
IDS's choice for his first three questions - Iraq - was in any event a signal to MPs to be on best behaviour rather than an invitation to wave their order papers in partisan display of approval. And it fell to Mr Blair and the Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy to offer their personal good wishes to the man who hopes to clinch an alternative career as a writer with today's launch of his new novel The Devil's Tune.
Still, Mr Duncan Smith was determined nothing would spoil his party. To that ironic welcome from the Labour benches, IDS told them it was too late and that they would have needed to have registered their vote by last Wednesday.
He provoked Labour laughter, and invited Tory discomfort, when - in devil-may-care-mode - he looked quizzically over his shoulder to the backbenchers who had deposed him as Mr Blair expressed confidence that the whole House wished him well for the future.
Then, finally, one last time, he did his duty by his party, prompting the cheers which would cover its embarrassment as he attacked Labour on the one issue on which he had always been, in that well-worn Thatcherite phrase, "one of us." IDS had done his sums and calculated he had asked Mr Blair the same question 18 times over the previous two years. As he wryly observed, "a fat lot of use it's done me."
Still, he would give it one more try. With this week's announcement of three more on the issue of devolution for the English regions, Mr Duncan Smith said Labour had allowed 37 referendums since coming to power. If they could have one to decide whether to have a monkey for mayor in Hartlepool, why not another on the much more important question of a president of Europe?
Mr Blair assured him the 19th time of asking wouldn't do him much good either, again insisting there would be no referendum on the proposed new EU constitution because it did not fundamentally alter Britain's constitutional relationship with Europe.
Undeterred, IDS pointed to Mr Brown's demand in The Daily Telegraph "of all papers" for categorical assurances that the constitution would not lead to fiscal federalism. They laughed again as he confided that sixth sense for leadership bids and advised Mr Blair to "watch very carefully".
Then, after one last refrain of the soundbite he had made his own - "nobody believes a word the prime minister ever says any more" - IDS was gone. And Chancellor Brown smiled on.