FOR one brief moment, unprecedented and possibly never to be repeated, Iain Duncan Smith made electrical emotional contact. His voice dropped to a steel whisper, the shoulders stiffened and the words echoed one by one in the hush.

“Do not underestimate the determination of a quiet man.”

There was a crackle as if the jump leads had finally connected, and the Tories, after so much polite and strained applause, surged into life with a roar.

Do not underestimate how much determination it took for this stiff, distant, pallid man to identify his signal weakness and make a virtue of it. After a week of self-doubt, here was an image to restore the faith of the faithful, and nourish the wilting grass roots. The Quiet Man. John Wayne in the 1952 film. The man of quiet honour, true grit. Write me off? “The Hay-ell you will.”

Before the unexpected appearance of Rooster Cogburn, the speech had been memorably forgettable, thunderously adequate. The hand gestures were emphatic, but always fractionally after the point. Banality sparred with platitude: “The country has moved on and so must we . . . money isn’t everything . . . no one in society gets stronger by making families weaker.” Ho hum.

Whatever.

The punchlines were often pulled, begging more questions than they answered. Behind IDS loomed the words: “It’s time for Leadership with Purpose.” Was this an acknowledgement that the last year has been purposeless, leaderless? “The right to buy is back.” Did it ever go away? “The Conservatives are back.” Where on earth have they been? “Try being told you’ve lost your job,” said IDS. One could almost hear the shadow frontbench plotters muttering: “Let’s try telling him: ‘You’ve lost your job’.”

The stage-managing was bizarre. Moments before IDS appeared we were gazing at a video screen on which loomed a vast horse’s rump, while a stable hand grumbled that Tories are “all old people”. Then we switched to IDS himself, apparently emerging from a gents toilet somewhere behind the stage and striding along the corridor towards the conference entrance in the manner of Bill Clinton’s appearance at the 2000 Democratic convention. He waved enthusiastically to left and right as he came, which was odd, because there was nobody in the corridor.

The speech was intended to look ahead — “It is right to be proud of the past, but it is wrong to try to live in the past” — and yet, like so much Tory thinking, it still came with a whiff of nostalgia, recalling a lost Tory Britain that never really existed, without muggers and waiting lists, inhabited by “the generation who built and defended this country we live in today”.

IDS declared triumphantly: “This means breaking with the dogma . . . in Holland, in Sweden and in Denmark, they have broken with dogma.” The audience looked faintly bemused. Who let the dogmas out? The frog was kept at bay by sipping flat soda water — “with the bubbles taken out”, a spin-doctor explained. That also seemed to be the strategy with his speech, which contained no humour, not a flicker of self-mockery.

But just when it seemed we were watching a flickering black and white production, in swaggered Iain Duncan Wayne, the quiet man. “I’ve known danger and I’ve tasted disappointment,” he said. There was genuine menace in his tone, a warning that even the quietest man can turn. “When I settle on a course, I stick to it.”

The Quiet Man ends with a punch-up, from which John Wayne emerges bloody but unbowed. The very bluntness with which IDS delivered that message galvanised the audience. He is at his best when at his baldest. Real enthusiasm flooded the hall, mixed with relief.

The strategy was borrowed from George Bush the elder, who declared in 1988: “I am a quiet man but I hear the quiet people others don’t.” Yesterday it worked for IDS.

Quiet men should not be underestimated, but nor should the gamble involved in advertising one’s political limitations.

America swiftly tired of the first President Bush and his unemphatic greyness. It is only a short step from a quiet man to an inaudible one.

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