Michael Ancram

The man has not been helpful.

He has written in the Telegraph asking the Tories to recapture their "soul". He also published a pamphlet entitled "still a conservative".

He has a point, that it is time to move on from rebranding and also that we must bear in mind our broad beleifs.

But a) we are moving on, the policy reviews as he himself states, are drawing to a close and we can go on the attack showing ourselves as the alternative. B) he should not have gone public. It means a day of bad media headlines on one hand set against yet more of Brown on TV.

It just does not help one bit, except for him as we all now know of his pamphlet.