Iain Duncan Smith: 'This is the toughest job that anyone will ever do... If somebody has an easy way of doing it, let me know'

For all Iain Duncan Smith's repeated protestations that the leadership "flim-flam and gossip" back in Westminster is of no interest to the wider public, his entourage stayed closely in touch with it during a visit to Oxford yesterday.

Shortly after 1pm, an aide's mobile rings as the Tory leader takes part in a live local radio phone-in. The message from London, immediately relayed to his wife, Betsy, who is listening in the back of a local Tory's people-carrier, is that a "very positive" report by the BBC's political editor, Andrew Marr, has just pointed out that all his potential leadership rivals were defeated last time around, and that a lot of the dissent is so much "squawking from the rhododendron bushes".

The mobile rings again with a report that the local Tory associations in the seats of four MPs named as leading plotters have backed the leader.

Two cheering moments in a difficult day. But Mr Duncan Smith has a point when he insists that in his three-week national tour, concluding today, no one besides journalists has raised the leadership question. None of yesterday's phoners-in even mentioned it, sticking instead to questions (some very long-winded) on pensions, European fisheries policy and "why in a city as prosperous as Oxford there is not a single Conservative councillor".

All of which the man of the moment dispatches without much trouble. Nevertheless, it is impossible to escape the leadership question. Earlier, he seemed rather glazed and distracted as he met young offenders, victims and members of the Oxfordshire Youth Offending Team. But that was almost certainly in anticipation of questions from the barrage of television crews assembled in the little office for only one reason.

The interviews over, he seems to recover while posing for pictures with two local Tory worthies. He overhears the ITN political correspondent, John Ray, doing a piece to camera only feet away, saying that the question of a leadership challenge looks likely to be a matter of when rather than whether. Grabbing him playfully by the arms, the most beleaguered figure in British politics asserts: "That was a very unbalanced package."

Call it denial or chutzpah as you will. But by the time he and Mrs Duncan Smith sit down with The Independent for lunch in the Randolph Hotel ­ risotto with bacon, chorizo, pancetta and mineral water for the record ­ the Quiet Man insists he is unfazed by the latest burst of dissent, the worst since he became leader.

"I am not in the slightest bit surprised by it. I know there are a few MPs who have differences. My view is that my agenda, my strategy, has been set and is not going to change,'' Mr Duncan Smith says. "I think colleagues realise that now. The vast majority buy into it. People want to succeed.

"I was endorsed by 61 per cent of my electorate to get on and 'do what you have got to do'. I am doing that. In the past 12 months we have travelled a great distance."

The leader admits that he sometimes has doubts about how to apply the strategy, but not the strategy itself. "I know where I am going. Every day I do this I become more and more certain that what I am doing is right," he says.

And then he adds: "I'm not going to be a Blair lookalike. If people want another Blair, they will go for the real man. I am not going to win by being Blair. If the public wants at the end of the day to trust Blair one more time they will do that. My job is to show there is an alternative which will bring a whole new character to government."

The public would turn to someone who was "sincere, straight and trustworthy. "People will say we are tired of all the fireworks."

When we suggest to Mr Duncan Smith that he is just too unexciting, he says: "You know as well as I do that this criticism was levelled at almost every single Opposition leader. Mrs Thatcher was seen as unexciting." Unexciting? The milk-snatcher? "Come on, everyone was writing that this woman was a disaster for the Conservative Party. She couldn't dominate a shoebox. Technically very good but wrong attitude, wrong image. All I'm saying is: she grew. She got stick for four years. You grow in the job and demonstrate through your own character who you are."

He contends that Mr Blair ­ "the only Opposition leader I can recall who was signed, sealed and delivered" ­ had it much easier than he does, much of the heavy lifting in rebuilding the party having already been done by Neil Kinnock and John Smith. "This is the toughest job that anyone will ever do ... If somebody can tell me there is an easy way of doing it, then please send me a signed, sealed envelope because I can't see it."

Mr Duncan Smith's tour has utterly convinced him, he says, that "all politics is local". Partly, of course, it suits his most urgent purpose: deflecting chatter about the leadership, to contrast the febrile atmosphere in Westminster with the more humdrum but electorally vital concerns of the public. But he insists that it has opened his eyes to the gulf between national politics and the concerns of local communities.

"People said the world was a global village but their village mattered more. Everything I see tells me that politics is local and must be played in a local context." Localism will be a Tory theme of the local elections next May. "The level that doesn't work at the moment is Whitehall." His tour will continue, not full-time but for a couple of days a week.

"The same goes for the Shadow Cabinet. I want the parliamentary party to spend a lot more time out of the House," he says. "People have not yet quite understood what we are about. But they are beginning to get a sense of it. Chunks of the population still have not understood."

Party members, he insists, showed they had "got it" at the conference last month in their huge response to the Quiet Man phrase. But hadn't Michael Portillo been implying that being the Quiet Man was not enough?

"We ARE projecting. That is what we ARE doing. We will go out and project who I am through this medium [ie local]. People will see me in their environment. The feedback [on the tour] has bowled me over.

"My answer to everybody is, we have to do more of this [ie get out], not retreat back into Westminster." Here, he adds, in a barely disguised criticism of his predecessor: "We tried that for four years. It didn't work. I became convinced of this two years ago, in the run-up to the general election."

The implication is that William Hague, whose brilliance at the dispatch box the present leader freely acknowledges, concentrated too much on Parliament and the bearpit of national politics. "The real reason why we have not broken back is because the public have stopped listening to the megaphone politics from Westminster. They [the critics] are missing the point," he says.

But weren't former ministers in the Major government being reasonable when they bridled at his criticisms of that era? Well, he had only been saying that "we cannot take the party back to 1997 again".

Mr Major's ministers, he says, have a "vested interest" in refighting old battles and so they "leap to the barricades". But this doesn't register with the public any longer, he insists. Nor was it his fault that he didn't have some of the big beasts, the Clarkes and the Portillos among them, in his Shadow Cabinet. "The big names from the Major years chose to do other things. I can only make a front bench with what is left to me."

And the offer of a government job, that Mr Major now says was never made? Well, he says, it was the job of Parliamentary Private Secretary to Jonathan Aitken. He had decided that while Europe was the dividing issue in the Tory party, he could not accept it. Mr Major presumably had not known about such a low-level offer.

And having proudly recalled his own Maastricht rebellion in his conference speech, how could he impose discipline over rebels against him. This had been a "constitutional issue" so big that he had to rebel, much as he didn't want to. "I was treated fairly at the time. I didn't have anyone descend upon me; what they did was to encourage me to be fair to them and I was. I would do the same to those who are in my party."

As the Tory leader prepares to fly to Scotland for the last leg of the tour, he concludes: "We have reached base camp. To get up the mountain of electoral success is going to be hell of a lot of hard work. It is not easy.

"I know where we are going. I know how tough it is going to be. There is no substitute for hard work between now and the general election."