Tory party conference: Is the 'nasty party' ready to make itself nicer?

As Iain Duncan Smith began his speech to the Tory faithful on Wednesday, a television monitor in the press room in Blackpool showed him speaking with an unfortunate caption below ­ "What future? Cancelled."

A sombre, truncated Tory conference has been overshadowed by the international crisis but the mood would have been pretty downbeat in any case given the party's crushing general election defeat in June.

In a rather nervous and occasionally faltering speech, Mr Duncan Smith positioned himself as a radical moderniser. But he did not say sorry for the election rout or accept that the Tories had got the message in the way that Tony Blair would probably have done.

However, there were some encouraging signs this week that the new Tory leader will prove to be a much more sophisticated character than the right-wing, Europhobic privatiser, which is how Labour will paint him when normal political hostilities resume.

He forced three Tory MPs to quit the far-right Monday Club, which advocates the voluntary repatriation of immigrants. He also gave an important nod in the direction of women, blacks and homosexuals in yesterday's speech, recognising that the Tory attitudes towards them had sent out a damaging signal. As Andrew Cooper, the party's former director of political operations, put it, the Tories had become "the nasty party".

In Blackpool this week, they began a long march towards trying to become the nice party. So public services should take priority over tax cuts and are even a more important issue than the single currency, according to the new mantra.

In effect, Mr Duncan Smith is saying "trust me", both to the voters and to his own party. He wants the electorate to trust him to bring forward new policies on health and education. He knows that Labour will cry "privatisation", as it did in 1997 when Tory plans to reform pensions backfired spectacularly. This fiasco frightened William Hague off the public services agenda during this year's general election campaign, even though that is what ordinary people cared about.

Mr Duncan Smith hopes that Labour's attacks will be blunted by the Government's own flirtation with bringing in the private sector to run public services, and the voters' growing impatience that Mr Blair has not kept his promise to improve them.

Meanwhile, Mr Duncan Smith is telling his own party that it must change if it is to regain power.

He hopes that, as a right-winger, he will have credit in the bank with his party precisely because he is in tune with its instincts. So he may be able to persuade the party to swallow unpalatable changes in a way that Michael Portillo could never have done.

Although Mr Duncan Smith is fascinated by the way Mr Blair transformed Labour in opposition, the more exact parallel is with Neil Kinnock. Because he came from the left, he was able to drag his party into the centre ground in a way that Mr Blair could never have done.

All the same, it remains to be seen whether Mr Duncan Smith can project the image of a nice, centrist party after including so many right-wingers in his unbalanced frontbench team.

The Tories have a long way to travel. My abiding memory of Blackpool 2001 will be the open spaces on the floor of the Winter Gardens conference hall; several rows of chairs had been removed because there were simply not enough Tory representatives to fill them.