KENNETH Clarke made the most savage attack by a senior Conservative on Tony Blair over the Iraq war and the aftermath of the London bombings yesterday, accusing him of making Britain one of the main targets for Islamic extremists.

The former Chancellor, newly entered into the Conservative leadership race, made a deliberate show of his heavyweight abilities by saying that Mr Blair has made Britain a more dangerous place through his “disastrous decision”. The reasons given for the UK supporting the war were “bogus”.

As Mr Clarke made the early headway in the race, however, there was growing speculation among Tory MPs that even now they could still lose their battle to choose their new leader. More than 1,000 senior party acitivsts are currently voting on whether to give up their right to pick the Tory leader and senior MPs said they were picking up signs of steady opposition to change.

A refusal to change the rules would be seen as bad news for Mr Clarke and good news for David Davis, the frontrunner, as well as making a laughing stock of Conservative MPs, but Mr Clarke made plain that he would stay in the race come what may.

His first speech of the campaign was a gamble because he risked upsetting Conservative MPs who voted for the war. But he made plain that he was not fighting old battles because Mr Blair, the man responsible for the events, had gone to the country and been re-elected. With Mr Blair having made one “catastophic error” in putting British troops into Iraq “we must seek to avoid further mistakes at home and abroad”.

Mr Clarke’s main aim was to show his party that, with the freedom of having opposed the war from the start, he is the candidate who can land the punches on Mr Blair on this and other issues. He appeared to criticise Mr Davis for going along too easily with agreed measures after the bombings. It was right to try to achieve a consensus, he said, but added: “I see little sign yet that the outline consensus that appears to be emerging is of adequate substance to match the threat.”

In his speech to the Foreign Press Association he scorned Mr Blair’s calls after the London bombings for more antiterrorist laws and the deportation of Muslim clerics. “I am aware of no evidence that a bomb has gone off because of a gap in the law,” he said. “The Government is also now seeking to blame our problems on the behaviour of extremist preachers in our midst.

“I support the expulsion of some of these vile propagandists from this country so long as the courts can be satisfied of their guilt of the crimes they are charged with . . . But the public and the media should not be persuaded by the spin from No 10 that ‘mad mullahs’ are the most important creators of the dangers we face.

“They are one of the symptoms of the problem rather than the cause of it. No amount of preaching in itself ever made any person turn to the barbaric practice of suicide bombing.”

Mr Clarke emphasised that during his time as Home Secretary he had backed tough laws. “However, we do not lack anti-terrorist laws. I do not believe that the recent London bombs were the result of any deficiencies in our legal system.”

Mr Clarke said that he had worked to strengthen the Atlantic alliance but American presidents were not always right.

In another brutal aside at Mr Blair he added: “There can be no room for spin. Self-knowledge is the key to building a relationship with the electorate. I am sorry that the Prime Minister does not understand the limited credibility of his administration. He is not in a position to say, ‘Trust me, there is a threat’, because people do not trust him.”

With Mr Clarke making the early running in the race David Cameron, another of his rivals, broke into his holiday to insist that he was the man for young voters. The Cameron camp has attacked the former Chancellor for being, at 65, too old for the job. Mr Cameron, 38, said that the Tories could win back power only by appealing to young voters. He said his age meant that he was in touch with their demands.

Speaking just hours after Mr Clarke, Mr Cameron, the Shadow Education Secretary, said that the Conservatives had to be in tune with the electorate. He said that reconnecting with younger voters was “a precondition for our future electoral success”. He indicated that he was best placed to know what young people wanted.

Mr Cameron said that young people increasingly took prosperity for granted. Their key concern was now getting a better quality of life. “In an age where economic stability and prosperity are increasingly taken for granted, younger generations care just as much about quality of life concerns — the environment, urban space, culture and leisure — as the traditional policy boxes in which we’ve conducted our debates. I know this is how young people feel because this is how I feel.”

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