Tory MPs should do their duty to their party and to their country

Unless they do, we shall suffer from a weakened and fragmented opposition just when we could most do with it being neither

In his excellent memoir Who Goes Home?, Roy Hattersley recounts his doomed struggle in a television interview on the – for Labour – dreadful last Saturday of the 1987 general election. His attempt to reconcile the dire contradictions in Labour's tax policy having predictably failed, the then shadow Chancellor telephoned his old friend, John Smith. "Was it as bad as I think?" he asked. "Worse," came Smith's succinct reply. Old history, of course, but history ominously relevant to the current plight of the Conservative Party as it struggles to reconcile its own, potentially just as fatal, contradictions on tax and spending.

For the parallels between early and mid-1980s Labour and the plight of the Tories become more suggestive by the day, and not just because of "the nervous breakdown" identified yesterday by the former party chairman, Chris Patten. Just as Labour would admit after 1987 that its real task in that election had not been to win but to avoid coming third, so the Tories' most potent fear for 2005-6 may yet be that of being eclipsed by the Liberal Democrats. And just as tax was one of the issues at the core of Labour's identity crisis, so too it is for the Tories now.

The essence of Labour's problem was that every instinct led it to the conclusion that more money was needed to rebuild the public services; every electoral imperative led it to the conclusion that unless it could expunge its reputation as a high-tax party, it stood little chance of being trusted to take office. The essence of modern Conservatism's – or at least the modern Conservative leadership's – problem, is an almost exact mirror image of that. Every instinct of Iain Duncan Smith – and here he was being true to himself in his Sunday Times interview – is for a smaller state, lower taxes and lower public spending. Every electoral imperative leads him to the conclusion that he can't afford to hold out the prospect of cuts in spending on public services that the electorate desperately wants to see improved.

Maybe Iain Duncan Smith wasn't really performing quite the U-turn attributed to him when he reasserted the Tories' commitment to lower taxes. In theory, at least, it is compatible with Michael Howard's more careful assertion that he could not promise to reduce taxes in his first budget. It is just about possible to say that, yes, in theory the party is committed to lower taxation. but in the short to medium term it can't promise to realise that objective. Indeed, that is more or less the pitch of Mr Howard, who is as instinctively keen on lower taxes – and much more privately bought health care, for example – as Mr Duncan Smith.

But not for the first time, Mr Howard has proved himself electorally more canny than Mr Duncan Smith. For in terms of low politics, what Mr Duncan Smith failed to realise was not so much that you can't have it both ways, but that if that's what you are doing, you should shut up about it. If your commitment to reduce taxes is inevitably undermined by your refusal to make it specific, then you can't really make it, as he promised to, part of the exciting and "coherent" message you intend to treat the voting public to over the next few months. Until you have some detailed numbers and policies to play with, the more you make of your tax-cutting ideology, the more you are vulnerable to the charge that either: (1) you want to decimate the public services; (2) you are talking baloney; or (3) both the above.

Now the problems of the Tory party are more fundamental than this. Chris Patten's suggestion yesterday that only a referendum vote in favour of economic and monetary union (EMU) would reunite the Tory party reflects the fact that the party's appearance of unity on Europe is illusory. Without straining the parallels with 1980s Labour, Europe is the equivalent of Labour's unilateralist defence policy then. Because of a stance not only of absolutism on EMU but also of treaty renegotiation that would almost certainly lead to British withdrawal from the EU, the party has deprived itself of many of those figures, Ken Clarke included, who would begin to restore some support among those less ideological voters on whom the party traditionally counted. They need these voters to offset the Lib Dem menace.

Of course, Clarke, who might or might not win a run-off among party members against David Davis, has the potential to divide the party on EMU if the party wants to. But which is worse – a popular pro-European leader who would have to allow his colleagues to vote according to their consciences in a referendum or a party that has cut itself off from some of its most electorally attractive figures?

But, in any case, it may not come to that. One of the most delicious peculiarities of the EMU decision facing the Government next year is that neither alternative is of much help to it in straight party terms. If it decides not to go ahead, the biggest objection within the Tory party to Clarke as leader falls because the most inflammatory issue is off the agenda for the parliament. If it decides to go ahead and wins, then it also falls – albeit later in the parliament – since Clarke would look a much more plausible leader for a party that had been forced to accept the pro-European decision of the British people.

The economic contradiction over tax and spending that surfaced at the weekend also goes to the heart of the leadership question. The present leadership is inhibited from fully exploiting what it detects to be unease about public expenditure growth – reinforced by the £11bn increase in borrowing announced by Gordon Brown last month – because of public suspicion of its own intentions.

Of course, there may come a time when voters despair of investment as well as reform in public services. A failure of delivery threatens the whole social democratic/ Christian Democratic approach. But that point hasn't been reached yet. And until it does, the attacks that Clarke makes on Labour profligacy will inevitably be more persuasive than those of the incumbent leadership – precisely because he has never adopted a slash-and-burn attitude to public services, including the NHS.

OK, this isn't unlikely to be a sharp issue until after the local elections in May. Which means that, at least until then, we shall suffer a weakened and fragmented opposition just when we could most do with it being neither. Does anybody think that, over Iraq for example, the current debate, such as it is, would not benefit from not only Clarke but also Lord Hurd or John Major or Sir Malcolm Rifkind being able to question and challenge government policy, as they have done, without being at odds with a party now enslaved to the most ultra-hawkish elements in Washington?

The fact is that when the crunch comes, perhaps next spring, Tory MPs will have a duty, in the interests of the country as well of their own party, to consider whether they want to carry on as now. Happily, the two interests already converge, pointing to only one credible answer.

d.macintyre@independent.co.uk