Britain: A former Conservative leader has likened his party to a dysfunctional family on a council estate as the debate gathers pace about its future direction and the method for electing Michael Howard's successor.
Mr Howard's shadow cabinet will today consider proposed new rules for the election of a leader this autumn amid increasingly urgent warnings that a change at the top is unlikely of itself to spark electoral revival against a third-term Labour government.
The "grandee" members of the Conservative Party Board met yesterday to consider draft proposals apparently designed to wrest the final power of decision back from the constituency activists, who used the rules bequeathed by William Hague to elect Iain Duncan Smith as his successor after the party's 2001 election defeat.
Under the current rules, Conservative MPs vote for their preferred candidate in a series of ballots until only two candidates remain in the field, at which point the final choice is made by the party's rank-and-file membership.
MPs have long complained that this system deprives them of crucial influence and can result in the election of a leader who does not enjoy the confidence of a majority of his parliamentary candidates. The Hague formula effectively fell into disrepute in autumn 2003 when the MPs successfully used the rules first to deny Mr Duncan Smith a vote of confidence and then to elect Mr Howard to succeed unopposed in a bloodless coup.
Plainly never reconciled to that decision, Mr Duncan Smith yesterday rejoined the debate, warning the Conservatives success would not be determined by magically finding the right leader.
"The messiah complex has got to go," he said in a Guardian interview. "The one thing Mrs T brought to the party was the impression that somehow you could have a person who is going to lead you to the promised land and they're going to arrive ready-made . . . We forget that Mrs Thatcher started in 1979 as a very strange person that nobody liked - the Times said she had all the charisma of a privet hedge . . . they used to attack me about charisma, but actually Mrs T had none at all."
Endorsing Tony Blair's ridiculing of the most recent Conservative election campaign, "IDS" said the Tories' challenge was to embrace "social justice" and persuade people that "their heart is in the right place".
One possible "modernising" candidate for the leadership, health spokesman Andrew Lansley, went further yesterday, suggesting the Conservatives should consider a name change and the renewal of its "gene pool".
Mr Lansley advocated a centrally driven A-list of parliamentary candidates to ensure much greater diversity in Conservative representation in the next House of Commons. He also argued that a change to "Reform Conservatives" might do for his party what "New Labour" had done for Mr Blair's.
"The point of saying we should describe ourselves as the Reform Conservatives was that it does not require the name of the Conservative Party to change: the Labour Party is still the Labour Party," he told The Times.
"They called themselves New Labour to indicate to the public that they had changed themselves and therefore were going to change the country.
"The public needs to know that the Conservative Party has reformed itself and is going to reform the country."