Centre-right Leaders Gather in Washington

Not to be outdone by the weekend's brainstorming session of the third way in Britain, Iain Duncan Smith and other centre-right leaders are today in Washington for a working dinner with the US president, George Bush.

The Washington meeting of the International Democrat Union (IDU) is being chaired by former Tory leader William Hague.

Mr Hague told BBC Radio 4's World This Weekend programme there was a clear trend of centre-right parties notching up electoral success.

He said: "A very important part of it is the failure of the left or centre-left governments to deliver."

Speaking BBC One's Breakfast with Frost programme before he flew to join 27 other leaders, Mr Duncan Smith was upbeat.

He said: "The difference has been that in the last 10 years the centre right has not been in charge in many places around the world but now we see a resurgence."

Australia, America, Italy and Spain were examples of that success, he said.

The Tory leader added that centre-right parties were promising better public services for voters but also ensuring people knew their neighbours would be helped too.

He said: "That is the purpose of my politics, which is that it's wider than just selfishness. It covers others as well and what they believe about people who are not so well off."

"As far as Tony Blair and the Labour party are concerned, they have committed the mistakes that many left-of-centre parties have made around the world. They have relied on government and politicians to run things. They think that if they take charge, it will get better.

"The first thing central government has to do is to recognise that actually so much of what it does when it takes control actually lessens the output at the other end ... because its focus is all about the political imperative for that month or half-year or year.

"What we first have to do is take a self-denying ordinance and say we are going to have to trust people on the ground to run this much more and trust ourselves less.

"Our priority is to make sure that we are able to present to the British people a programme of change for their public services and quality-of-life issues that delivers real improvements, and on the back of that to demonstrate that, by doing that, you are actually reducing the scale and size of government that so often stands in the way of achievement."

Mr Duncan Smith refused to say whether his commitment to devolving power in the public services would be coupled with tax cuts: "We have to consciously push that power down and then we can talk about how the financing works in terms of how it should be raised and where it should be raised from."

He derided Mr Blair's third way philosophy, saying: "The third way was ultimately only a process for getting into power by saying that they weren't Old Labour and they weren't the Conservatives, so somehow they must be all right. In fact, they haven't delivered. Things have got worse."

The Tory leader insisted the on-going policy review within the Conservative party would have far-reaching effects, despite its apparently slow evolution.

He said: "I have possibly the most aggressive and most structured review process that has been put in place by a Conservative leader since Mrs Thatcher before 1979."