The greatest no-show on earth: the amazing disappearing Tory party

Go out and help the poor! Lay your hands upon the sick! These are the latest instructions to Conservative MPs from Iain Duncan Smith as he seeks to reconnect his party with the voters. He has told his parliamentary colleagues to select a week away from their parliamentary duties in order to help those in need. For a few days at least Conservative MPs will be good Samaritans in their dealings with the poor.

One of the slight problems with this project is that in many cases it is those very same Tory MPs who might well benefit from a comforting chat with a Samaritan. Most of them are bewildered or depressed – in some cases both. A year ago they were on an artificial high, boosted by a leadership contest that gave them a false sense of importance. For a few weeks they seemed to matter as they manoeuvred and intrigued to prevent Michael Portillo or Ken Clarke from becoming their new leader. Now they have to come to terms with the latest bleak opinion polls that suggest they are as far away from getting a whiff of power as they have ever been.

For leading Conservatives those polls are ghastly. In recent weeks Tony Blair has put up taxes, lost a senior minister and suffered at the hands of right-wing newspapers over the Black Rod affair. But the polls suggest he would still win a landslide victory tomorrow. I am reminded of a prophetic cartoon from the late 1980s. It depicted a tormented Neil Kinnock waking up in a terrible sweat. His wife asks him what is wrong. The Labour leader replies: "I've just had a terrible dream in which I reform the party, I see off the SDP, the Conservatives screw up the economy – and I still bloody lose the election." The Conservatives visit the poor, the Government screws up – and Mr Duncan Smith is still bloody miles behind.

Part of the Tory leader's response to being behind in the opinion polls for so long is to attempt to turn the Conservatives into the nice party. But internal polling suggests that most voters continue to regard the Tories as nasty. So Mr Duncan Smith is tentatively tiptoeing on to the agenda formerly promoted by Michael Portillo. That is one of the reasons why Conservative MPs will flee Westminster to work with the disadvantaged and the sick. During the last Parliament Mr Portillo made much of his experience as a hospital porter. Soon, virtually every Conservative MP will have spent a night or two in that role. Tory backbenchers may not be the sharpest political operators, but they will know a bedpan when they see one.

Mr Duncan Smith is embracing the Portillo agenda still further. Last week he had breakfast with the mighty executive of the 1922 Committee of senior backbenchers. His single theme was the pre-eminent importance of "inclusiveness". The Conservative Party, he said, had to become more representative of society as a whole. Mr Portillo, too, would have uttered similar words if he had been sitting there, orange juice and croissant in hand, addressing the same group of anxious senior MPs.

Those worried Tories are a divided bunch as they head out to enhance the lives of the disadvantaged. One senior Conservative, who was at the breakfast, makes two observations. "During the week my job is to represent my constituents at Westminster, not to go and serve soup at a centre for the homeless." He also wonders where all this talk of inclusiveness is leading. Nor is he one of those reactionaries who worry about it leading in an ominous direction. Indeed, he doubts whether the strategy is leading in any direction at all.

In a separate camp there are the followers of Michael Portillo, partly confused because they now have no one to follow. Mr Portillo has left them behind to make television programmes about Wagner and Spanish football teams. A year ago Tory MPs were enjoying themselves plotting against Mr Portillo. Now he is enjoying himself analysing the plot of The Ring. But his supporters are still on the scene, alarmed at the slow pace of change within the party.

The common theme running through these tensions and frustrations explains why the Conservatives are still in such a dreadful mess. Their internal debate is all about how the party is perceived. Mr Duncan Smith wants to "show" that the Conservatives care by getting his MPs to spend a night or two with the poor. The followers of Mr Portillo seek to demonstrate that the party has changed by selecting candidates from the ethnic minorities. But what has the party really changed from, and what has it changed to? What do these tokenistic gestures represent? There is no row, or discussion even, about these questions in the Conservative Party. Instead, there is a marginal debate over whether Mr Duncan Smith is being tokenistic enough. It is a row over symbolism, a clash of symbols.

That is why no one seems to be listening. Compare this puny, internal debate to the titanic challenges that a self-destructing Labour Party faced in the 1980s. While Tory MPs agonise over whether to attend a soup kitchen, Neil Kinnock had to change his party's position – and his own strongly held personal convictions – in every major policy area. In the 1980s Kinnock was on the front pages most days of the week, the media paradoxically reaffirming Labour's relevance as it reported extensively on its near-demise. The Conservatives are hardly ever in the newspapers these days. They have become irrelevant.

This is very odd, utterly different from Labour's dilemmas in the 1980s. In the media and in terms of ideas generally, the right is still a formidable force in Britain. Even after two landslide wins the Government still feels obliged to pay occasional homage to its Thatcherite inheritance. Last week Alan Milburn, the Health Secretary, exaggerated the role of the private sector in the NHS; Estelle Morris, the Education Secretary, made it clear that she would not touch some schools "with a bargepole"; and Mr Blair played to the gallery over the issue of asylum. On the euro, the Government is still too scared to put the case for entry, its near-silence a tribute to the strength of the deadly right-wing newspapers. Another of the Government's declared aims was to "modernise" Britain. What chances are there for substantial modernisation after the Queen Mother's funeral and the Jubilee, both of which were propaganda triumphs for the traditionalist right?

One of the great political books from the last century was George Dangerfield's The Strange Death of Liberal England, which related social and economic changes in the early 1900s to the decline of the Liberal Party. This decline is quite different. Conservative England is alive and kicking, its ideas rarely challenged, its newspapers as poisonously self-confident as ever. But the Conservative Party is disappearing in front of our very eyes.