The Tory battle over Europe raged on the fringe of the Conservative Party conference yesterday, and speculation about Mr Michael Portillo's leadership ambitions continued as he paid a one-day visit to speak about education.
But as the former chancellor, Mr Kenneth Clarke, accused senior party figures of breaking policy and seeking to rule out British membership of the single currency, the shadow foreign secretary, Mr John Maples, insisted Conservatives were not seeking to renegotiate past EU treaties.
However, Mr Maples said they wanted an amendment to the Treaty of Rome which would allow members to decide at national level "whether or not to apply new European legislation outside the core areas of the single market and free trade".
Mr Maples, who registered a zero recognition factor in a pre-conference poll, denied charges from Mr Clarke and Mr Michael Heseltine that the shadow cabinet was being forced to adopt ever more anti-EU policies. But he said if the EU was not reformed and made more competitive it would be "a recipe for disaster".
The party leader, Mr William Hague, denied a significant split on European policy. And he received a boost when the former party chairman, Lord Tebbit, declared himself "a far happier Conservative today than I have been for a very long time".
In a rebuke to the Major government, Lord Tebbit welcomed Mr Hague's decision to campaign under the "common sense" banner, saying it was the message the party had successfully deployed in the 1979, 1983 and 1987 elections. He brought conference representatives to their feet with an attack on the Blair government over the early release of terrorist prisoners in Northern Ireland, and its response to the Patten proposals on the future of the RUC.
The force, said Lord Tebbit, had acted as "the thin green line between bloody anarchy and the rule of law", and he urged conference to fight to save the force and prevent its uniform and badge being dumped in "the moderniser's trash can".
Lord Tebbit, whose wife was gravely injured in the IRA's Brighton bombing, attacked the police reforms proposed by another former party chairman, Mr Chris Patten, as "infinitely damaging" and said that while Mr Blair had released terrorists, bombers, kneecappers, kidnappers, arsonists and killers their victims remained "imprisoned within their broken bodies".
He was speaking during a law-and-order debate which saw another barnstorming performance by Ms Ann Widdecombe, the shadow home secretary, who claimed Britain was witnessing rising crime under Labour. She said the government's immigration policy was failing Britain and genuine asylum-seekers.
Pledging to extend tenfold the number of secure training centres, Ms Widdecombe said young offenders would be given flexible sentences which could earn them early release, and once out of the criminal justice system they would have "the slate wiped clean" if they did not reoffend within two or three years.
In an unmistakable assault on the leadership line, Mr Clarke echoed Mr Heseltine's view that the two years since the election had seen "extreme Euro sceptics" pushing party policy further and further toward eventual withdrawal. "For tactical reasons they cloak their real position in the language of renegotiating the treaties and seek to find issues upon which they say Britain should repudiate treaty commitments," he said.
Meanwhile, ahead of tomorrow's platform appearance by Mr David Trimble, his party colleague, Mr Jeffrey Donaldson MP, has said politicians must consider alternatives to the Belfast Agreement which exclude Sinn Fein.
Addressing the Conservative Integration Group, Mr Donaldson issued a barely-veiled warning to his leader, saying: "No amount of fancy choreography or wordplay will mask the reality that what we need is an actual end to violence and actual disarmament of illegal weapons before any Sinn Fein IRA member can be appointed a minister in the government of Northern Ireland."