Ten key Portillo backers switch support to Clarke

Kenneth Clarke won the support of important members of Michael Portillo's team last night as he declared that the next general election would be thrown "wide open" if he was elected Tory leader.

Ten fellow MPs, all of whom had supported Mr Portillo until he was eliminated from the leadership race, announced that Mr Clarke was the candidate best placed to win lost voters.

Nine of them, including Andrew MacKay, the shadow Northern Ireland Secretary, and Stephen Dorrell, a former cabinet minister, made a joint statement to declare their allegiance. The tenth, the former armed forces minister Nicholas Soames, told The Times that he was now supporting Mr Clarke.

The MPs stressed that they were Eurosceptic but accepted Mr Clarke's assurances that he would appoint a Shadow Cabinet reflecting the predominant views of his party and allow a free debate on the euro.

Edward Garnier, the shadow Attorney General, John Butterfill MP, Robert Key MP, David Ruffley MP and Julie Kirkbride MP joined the frontbenchers Damian Green and Richard Ottaway in supporting the former Chancellor.

The Clarke camp believes the MPs reflect a wider trend among many Portillo supporters who believe the party cannot win power under Iain Duncan Smith, the shadow Defence Secretary.

As the rivals left London for a two-week "truce", Mr Clarke issued a blunt warning that the Tories could not win a general election on a right-wing platform and must find moderate ground "with some purpose".

He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "I don't think you can win an election from the right. What you have to do is get into the moderate ground, although, of course, everybody varies in their definition of that."

Earlier, Mr Duncan Smith rejected as "meaningless" a poll in The Daily Telegraph that put him significantly ahead of Mr Clarke in the eyes of Tory activists.

He said: "If [the Conservatives] want to win the next election ... we have to put the Europe issue on one side, settle it, but then move on to the issues that really obsess the public which are their failing public services, a sort of ration-book state that the Government is now giving them, and its incapacity, its inability to be able to deliver anything that it promised in quality on either welfare, health, education or even on the environment."