Tory gives warning on 'Little Englander' policies

A senior ally of Michael Portillo said yesterday that the Tory party risked an even bigger defeat at the next election unless it ditched its "Little Englander" policies and its opposition to Tony Blair's overseas visits.

Last week Iain Duncan Smith ridiculed the Prime Minister's "designer diplomacy" to India and Pakistan.

Mr Blair will travel abroad again this week, on a mini-tour of Africa, and yesterday made a spirited defence of the trips he has made since 11 September.

Francis Maude, a former shadow foreign secretary, said yesterday that the Conservatives should never allow themselves to be "caricatured" on foreign policy. Mr Maude, who was launching a Tory think- tank, Policy XChange, said that he and like-minded colleagues wanted a new direction on such issues.

"We will robustly promote what we believe in, which is the need for the Conservative Party to move on, for us to be a relentlessly internationalist party, outward-looking," he told Breakfast With Frost on BBC television. "Never ever must we be seen in such a way that we can be caricatured as being Little Englanders. I find that grossly offensive. We are an internationalist party, internationalist people with a global outlook. We must never allow that to happen again."

When asked to assess Mr Duncan Smith's time as leader, Mr Maude said: "I think some good things have happened, but there is still certainly the risk that the Conservatives will go backwards.

"We can't assume we have a God-given right to move off the bottom and gain popularity. We have to earn it bit by bit. There is a huge long way to go and not very much time, so the case I am making is that the process of renewal and change has to be entered into in a really wholehearted way."

Mr Maude raised doubts over whether Mr Duncan Smith's comments on making the party more welcoming to women and people from the ethnic minorities would be translated into action. "We have got to be a party that is seen to be generous and broad and not narrow. People found it far too easy to characterise us as being mean-minded and disagreeable," he said.

"This is not about presentation, it has to come from inside. We have to be people who are positively for things, not against them."