WITNESSING the charge of the Light Brigade, a French general observed “C’est magnfique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre.”

Something similar may be said today of the fight to the death which Iain Duncan Smith has arranged for after lunch, and few can be found who think he has a chance.

It is magnificent, it is not politics, it is not what I expected, but it is his right. It used to be said of Mr Duncan Smith that he was failing to make any appreciable impact on the British public, few of them even knowing who he was. They know who he is now. His death throes have been sensational.

He has to go. Hostile to his election two years ago, I was almost won over by the generous attempt he then made to heal wounds in his party, but leaders must be managers and I despaired (and his colleagues despaired) of his judgment of men. This, not his “quietness” (which the public rather liked), became the problem. I was sure at the beginning of this year that he could not last, and said so.

But I cannot join the dance on Mr Duncan Smith’s political grave. He was a man of modest ability, no less, no more. Bruce Anderson, a columnist with whom I began my political career in the Conservative Research Department, remarked shrewdly of this leader that men promoted above their abilities may end up by performing beneath them.

Struggling to prove that he was what he was not, this unremarkable politician cut a remarkably risible public figure. His party conference speech earlier this month was a huge embarrassment.

In time, the solid work Iain Duncan Smith has done hammering together the foundations of a policy platform for his party will be recognised, but until then he deserves respite both from our mockery and — surely worse for him — the crocodile tears and gushing obituaries of those like me who tried to hasten his fall. He must inwardly retch every time he hears the words “honourable” and “decent”. He did not aim to be honourable and decent: he aimed to win, and he has lost. The manner in which his craven parliamentary party clutched at the news media to perform by proxy the deed they lacked the courage to risk personally, is to their lasting discredit.

By whom and how is he to be replaced? In The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot describes the euphoria which surrounds incoming political leaderships, causing “their hitherto obscured virtues to shine forth in full-rounded splendour”, free “from the coercion of any antecedents”. The wolfish Michael Howard, of whom as Home Secretary not many years ago it was almost impossible to speak well without amazing your audience, seems this morning to have been made anew. No doubt he will shortly be smiling at the nation in grandmotherly bonnet and bows. Oliver Letwin, much spoken-of as a possible running-mate for Mr Howard, similarly gives an impression that, having charmed you, he might want to eat you.

I think highly of Mr Howard. I can certainly imagine him as Prime Minister. But the parliamentary party had better remember that during its last Government he became one of the most hated politicians in Britain. If Gordon Brown’s financial drift continues, then voters may begin develop a hankering for a hatchet man, but the Tories should take care.

As a centrist Conservative myself, I would want to believe that Mr Howard was part of an enterprise in whose future colleagues such as Kenneth Clarke and Michael Portillo felt they had a real stake.

And there is a trap. A Howard-David Davis duo would make a very strong showing both in the parliamentary party and in the country, but outside these territories it would be characterised as a brutal sort of ticket.

An urgent effort at internal conciliation should start before any leadership contest, and be seen in its results. For the Tory party is still sick, and what happens today is hardly calculated to cool its brow.

Call this psycho-babble, but I believe the party is suffering from collective post-traumatic stress disorder. The political murder of their heroine, rescuer and empress, in an act of treachery by the party, convulsed the Tory tribe. The convulsions continue to this day.

Since she fell, the party has sensed itself unable properly to anoint any successor. John Major was seen only as a kind of regent for an empress who was never going to return. William Hague looked like an upstart. Iain Duncan Smith encouraged hopes among her most implacable priesthood that he could carry her mantle, but he could not. Because she was not justly removed, every leader since Margaret Thatcher has felt like a usurper.

This can only end in either institutional death, or a superhuman act of reconciliation within the party. If or when Iain Duncan Smith steps aside, almost anybody could lead the Conservative Party — and perhaps do it better than he did: but only until the madness recurs. The party’s need now is not just to be led until Christmas, but to be saved for the millennium. No white knight will do this, and Mr Duncan Smith was right to say so.

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