TORY LEADERSHIP ELECTION: Redwood hints at a populist manifesto

In his first press conference as a Tory leadership candidate, John Redwood hinted at a populist manifesto based on protecting the pound from Brussels while on the domestic front, cutting bureaucracy, bolstering teachers and saving popular hospitals.

"I wish to set out a series of policies with broad appeal," Mr Redwood said. "I am in the Conservative Party because I think it is right for the United Kingdom and I believe our policies have to appeal very widely across the spectrum."

Flanked by a clutch of Euro-sceptics and other malcontent MPs, Mr Redwood announced his candidature to a chaotic Westminster press conference within hours of resigning as Secretary of State for Wales.

Norman Lamont, the former Chancellor, sat alongside Mr Redwood and Edward Leigh, another sacked minister, stood near by. The only question Mr Redwood dodged was whether he agreed with Mr Lamont that if Britain was not already a member of the European Union there would no reason to apply.

"I am not contemplating withdrawal from the EU," Mr Redwood said. But he was cheered by his Euro-sceptic backers by an implicit rejection of a single currency.

"I will be saying that the abolition of the pound is not the sort of thing Conservatives should be doing and all the time I was prime minister I would not bring proposals forward to abolish the pound," he said.

"Certainly we have to call a halt on the transfer of new powers to Brussels. And we do need to look at whether there are powers we can get back.

"That, I trust, will be the task of the Government in the run-up to the Inter-governmental conference. It builds on the very successful negotiation of so-called subsidiarity - the idea that you identify those things what are better done at the level of the national or of local government and transfer them back. We need to build on that and develop it in a more radical way."

Pressed on whether there would be a place in a Redwood Cabinet for Mr Lamont, the Wokingham MP's reply seemed to open the door for his most prominent supporter while closing it for pro-Europeans such as Kenneth Clarke and Michael Heseltine.

Forming a Cabinet required that all its members were happy with the general thrust and principles of the Government, "and of course the wishes of the leader where those have been set out in advance. I am very happy to work with any senior colleague who would like to work with me having set out my platform."

Mr Lamont told the meeting that the leadership election was "about the future of Britain as a free, independent country, governed from Westminster, answerable to nobody but the British people".

Mr Redwood said the single currency and referendum were not the issues behind his resignation.

"I didn't make the decision lightly. I made the decision having thought it through and having decided the only honourable thing to do was to resign because I fundamentally disagreed with the decision the Prime Minister took to open up the contest and resign the leadership," he said.

Mr Redwood insisted he had "behaved honourably throughout". He had done nothing in private or public to undermine Mr Major and had "never plotted" with Michael Portillo on the leadership.

The Conservative Party was "a broad church or it is nothing", he declared. The policies I set out will have broad appeal. That will be the object of them".

More detail will be revealed today. In a foretaste he said he would not be calling for cuts in public spending. "I will be calling for tighter control over its growth rate, which has been very fast in the last four years.

"I certainly don't wish to see any cuts in essential services like education or health, where I wish to see good sums of money spent on nurses, doctors and teachers, as we have been doing over recent years in the Government."

Mr Redwood said that during his tenure in Wales, he had tried to make a clear statement of his beliefs and put them into action.

"There is no contradiction in my stance. What I have said about the NHS in Wales is, I thought there was too much spent on management and administration and I have been reducing that with a series of policy measures.

"I have always said where people want to exercise their choice in favour of a local, or smaller, or even older hospital, that was fine by me and as their Secretary of State I defended their rights wherever possible and I tried to keep those hospitals open.

"As Prime Minister, I would hope that my health secretary would take a similar view for England to that I took in Wales."

Mr Redwood also stood by his controversial remarks on single mothers, some of whom he suggested became pregnant to jump the housing queue.

Acknowledging he had been looking at the radical right-wing ideas of Newt Gingrich, he said the Republican Speaker of the United States House of Representatives was "not the leader of some ideological clique" and had just won one of the most smashing election victories in American history.

"I do think it is worth looking at what was so popular in Newt Gingrich's programme, but also understanding that American Republicanism is a different animal from British Conservatism.

"There may be ideas we can borrow," he said, but "lots of others" ought to be avoided.

On Northern Ireland, Mr Redwood lauded the achievements of John Major and Sir Patrick Mayhew as "wholly admirable" and said he had no wish to see the process jeopardised in any way.

He also shared Mr Major's opposition to devolution for Scotland and Wales.