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Article: Five minutes to save the Conservative Party Duncan Smith's secret weapon is his private, almost apologetic reasonableness
- Article from:
- The Sunday Telegraph London
- Article date:
- October 7, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 2001 The Sunday Telegraph London. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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On Friday, I spoke to a Shadow Cabinet member who was spending
the morning excising the last jokes from his speech to be delivered
at the Conservative Party Conference in Blackpool this week. "I
thought I'd leave one or two gags in," he said to me, "but then I
had this horrible image of myself standing at the podium and getting
a cheap laugh - just as my pager told me that the first missile had
landed on Kandahar."
This, it goes without saying, will be no ordinary Tory
conference: which is to say, it may be quite a civilised event. For
more than a decade these annual seaside gatherings have been a riot
of factional fury, as Euro-federalists have slugged it out with Euro-
sceptics, social ...