As the Tories continued their warfare over Europe last night, the former chancellor, Mr Kenneth Clarke, cast his shadow over Mr William Hague by confirming that it remains his ambition to be party leader and prime minister.
Mr Hague renewed his warning that the Tories would oppose British membership of the European Single Currency for the "foreseeable future". But in a strategy apparently designed to bind party wounds, Mr Hague - and his foreign affairs spokesman, Mr Michael Howard - declined to say specifically if their opposition to British membership would hold for the lifetime of the present parliament.
Pressed to say if he ruled out membership for 10 years, Mr Hague replied: "I'm not going into hypotheses about future parliaments. It means certainly if there was a referendum on the single currency in the next few years we would be campaigning for a `no' vote."
In his conference speech, Mr Howard repeated the "foreseeable future" formula. But the leadership's attempts to build bridges fell on deaf ears on the conference fringe, where Mr Norman Lamont and Sir Leon Brittan argued alternatively that opposition to the currency was the road to salvation or ruination.
The former chancellor said a campaign for a "no" vote would put the Conservatives "on the path back to power". Addressing a joint meeting of the Bruges Group and Conservatives Against a Federal Europe, Mr Lamont said: "A political party can only unite around what it believes. William Hague's policies are those of the mass of the Conservative party. He has adopted the policies to unite the party. But it is vital that the party makes its position ever clearer to the country . . . Far from opposition to the single currency making the Conservatives irrelevant, the opposite is true. The Tories will be utterly irrelevant if they do not wholeheartedly oppose a single currency."
However, Sir Leon, who is Britain's European Commission vice-president, warned his party to accept the inevitability of the single currency. Sir Leon told the Conservative Group for Europe that EMU "will happen in 1999 and there is no point in the Conservative party sticking its head in the sand, thinking it will go away of its own accord. It will not".
He continued: "Conservatives have always been proud of their pragmatism. Languishing in glorious isolation, divorced from the events of the real world, would be a profoundly un-Conservative response . . . The facts speak for themselves. The push towards EMU has led to an unprecedented wave of liberalisation, deregulation and privatisation on continental Europe. These are precisely the policies the conservatives pioneered in the 1980s. To condemn EMU before it has even started would be to ensnare the party in a trap of political irrelevance."
Meanwhile, as Mr Hague battled to pull the party behind his banner, his defeated leadership rival, Mr Clarke, failed to rule out another tilt at the top job. Asked if he would ever challenge a serving Tory leader, Mr Clarke replied: "I have no idea. I have no intention of standing against the present one. . .at this time."