Tebbit tells Tory leader to drop 'squabbling' advisers

Iain Duncan Smith faced calls to replace some of his advisers yesterday, with senior Tories dismissing them as "squabbling children" and "idiotic minor functionaries".

Recent feuding within the party increased. Lord Tebbit called for the dismissal of Dominic Cummings, the Conservative director of strategy, and Mark MacGregor, the party's chief executive.

Lord Tebbit said that "spotty youths, researchers, assistants and party apparatchiks with narrow vision and short memories" were undermining the leader and called on him to "clear the squabbling children out of Central Office".

He attacked Mr Cummings, who courted controversy earlier this year by claiming in The Independent that "just about the only thing less popular than the euro is the Tory Party".

Nicholas Soames, a former defence minister, also launched a withering attack on Tory strategy. He claimed that "Iain is a decent, honourable man, but Central Office is full of idiotic minor functionaries who haven't got the foggiest idea how to run a serious party".

Mr Soames said the party had a "mad obsession with gays, blacks and women" and claimed it now looked like "a poor man's version of the Church of England". He said: "We have got to stop boring people about irrelevant issues like how many gay candidates we have and concentrate on issues that matter to ordinary decent people instead of a few weirdos in Islington.

"This Government has made a God-awful mess of law and order, the NHS, schools and other areas that affect people's lives. But what impact have the Conservatives had on attacking them? Absolutely zero. Do we look like a serious, sane, responsible political party ready to take power? No."

Meanwhile, Conservative candidates have been stung by gossip published on a new "high Tory" website. The electricreview.com site includes anonymous and less than flattering references to party activists selected to fight parliamentary seats.

Last week a report by the Centre for Policy Studies, a right-wing think-tank, accused the Conservatives of being "worse than useless".

Rupert Darwall, a special adviser to the most recent Tory government, claimed Conservative spokesmen earned the contempt of voters by relying on "children" at Conservative Central Office to draw up strategy.

Mr Cummings is out of the country. A party spokeswoman also declined to comment on the row. But Francis Maude, a former shadow foreign secretary and a leading supporter of Michael Portillo's failed leadership bid, defended Mr Duncan Smith's strategy and staff.

He told the BBC's Breakfast with Frost programme: "I think these are good people who are doing a good job. Iain has set his course and rightly he has decided and he has concluded as many of us have that there is a new political terrain.

"The political world has changed and the Conservative Party needs to do what it has always needed to do once in a generation, which is drag itself up to date and become a truly contemporary party.

"We go through the same pattern through the centuries and decades.

"We have a long period of ascendancy, it goes horribly wrong at the end, we lose and we then have to drag ourselves up ... and become once again a modern, centralised party that gains the support of the public as being a proper, alternative government."