Iain Duncan Smith has compared the vote of no confidence in his leadership to a "near death experience".

However, speaking to the BBC on Monday, the outgoing Conservative leader insisted he was right in challenging his critics to "put up or shut up".

Last Wednesday, Duncan Smith lost a confidence vote by 75 votes to 90.

The experience, he said, was "rather like almost being detached from yourself in one of those near death experiences".

"You reach the stage where you can actually begin to read the newspapers with complete detachment as though you are reading about somebody else," he told the Radio 4 Start the Week programme.

"Half the stories I was reading I just couldn't see myself described in them.

"There was this sense that I don't quite understand what it's all about."

"Politics as we all know is a brutal business," he added.

As Duncan Smith leaves Central Office to focus on promoting his first novel, The Devil's Tune, his shadow chancellor Michael Howard looks likely to succeed him as party leader.