Duncan Smith: Urged to sack advisers

The Conservative Party leader should sack the "squabbling children" employed in Central Office, Lord Tebbit has said.

But his comments have been dismissed as "wrong" by another senior Tory, Francis Maude.

The new row follows the recent party in-fighting surrounding the removal of David Davis from his post as party chief.

And now the intervention of the outspoken Lord Tebbit is set to keep Tory divisions in the headlines.

The peer, himself a former party chairman, said that Iain Duncan Smith should sack Conservative chief executive Mark MacGregor and strategy director Dominic Cummings.

Lord Tebbit wrote in the Sunday Telegraph that the "spotty youths, researchers, assistants and party apparatchiks" employed by the party were undermining the leader.

"Iain Duncan Smith needs to clear the squabbling children out of Central Office," he wrote.

Clarifying who he was referring to, Lord Tebbit said: "He ought to sack guys like Mark MacGregor and Dominic Cummings."

MacGregor is a former leader of the Federation of Conservative students - shut down by Lord Tebbit when he was party chairman.

And Cummings has been blamed for the public in-fighting surrounding the removal of David Davis, but has denied the claims.

Duncan Smith appeared set to reject Lord Tebbit's advice.

"He has a good team working for him and is very happy with their performance," a spokesman for the Conservative leader said.

And Francis Maude told the BBC that Lord Tebbit had got it wrong.

"I think these are good people who are doing a good job," he said.

"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."

Maude, who backed Michael Portillo's modernising agenda during the battle for the Conservative leadership, said the party needed to "drag itself up to date and become a truly contemporary party".

"We go through the same pattern through the centuries and decades," said Maude. "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 and respect of the public as being a proper, alternative government."

And Maude said Duncan Smith had been "doing the right things" since becoming leader.

"It is not going to be an overnight turn-around. These things don't happen like that. What there is going to be is a steady pull-back, a steady winning back of people's respect, which we are not going to do by launching into all-out bare-knuckle fights with Labour about everything," he said.

The latest interventions in the debate over the party's direction again bring to the surface the tensions between party modernisers and traditionalists.

It follows the disclosure that some party members wanting to adopt a more liberal social agenda have discussed setting up their own "Start Again Party".

But Maude said that reports of a split were unfounded.

"That is a lot of silliness and a bit of misinterpretation, as far as I can understand it, by people who are on the fringes and I don't think that is of any account at all," he said.