Tory Wars Simon Walters Politico's, 256pp, £18.99 ISBN 1842750267

Once, as I shared a taxi with Michael Portillo and Tina Stowell, one of William Hague's senior aides, from Conservative Central Office to a Strategy Team awayday, I looked at shoppers in Regent Street and remarked to Michael that there were advantages to private life. It was a fine but crisp day, the kind that makes one yearn for freedom. I commented that I had not been to Liberty or Hamleys for a decade, but that what really struck me was how unhurried the people were.

Michael, who had recently been out of parliament for two years, agreed. It is said that his overriding reaction to losing the leadership was relief, and certainly, when I decided not to stand - acknowledging that enthusiasm for me among the party membership was not shared among colleagues - my disappointment was mixed with relief. Yet it is widely believed that the two of us spent half the last parliament with our horns locked in a war for the succession to Hague.

Simon Walters has produced an entertaining book, a good read, which has been a revelation to me by exposing life behind the scenes in the Tory party. On more than one occasion - as I read the volume in a single session, unable to put it down - I found myself exclaiming: "Is that why William changed his mind?" Or: "Ah! I thought so."

Serious historians allow for coincidences, accidents, cock-ups. Tabloid journalists, nervous politicians and ambitious aides prefer plots, conspiracies and counterplots, and Walters is a tabloid journalist writing about a group of nervous politicians surrounded by hugely ambitious and, it would appear, positively paranoid aides.

Walters calls his book Tory Wars. Wars demand causes, because no one fights or dies on a whim. So what was the cause of such division? It is to Hague's lasting credit that he succeeded in uniting the Conservative Party over Europe, at least to the extent that it ceased to argue non-stop about the issue in public. For a while, Europe became as old hat as the Corn Laws.

To fill the gap left by Euro wars, the press invented a new division: mods versus rockers, or libertarians versus authoritarians. Initially, I gave little credence to such classifications. There had always been a mix of views, in all parties, over moral issues such as abortion, the age of consent or divorce laws, and there for ever would be. Such matters were almost invariably issues of conscience and free votes, not of manifestos and general election platforms.

It was said that Michael Portillo and I were locked in a battle over homosexual rights. However, given that I had never advocated outlawing homosexuality or alternative lifestyles, while Michael was the architect of a scheme to promote marriage through tax incentives, any disagreement between us on an issue of conscience scarcely seemed to merit the description of war.

Yet the latter-day Conservative Party seems unable to laugh off such absurdities, instead reaching out eagerly for any cap the press offers it, and wearing it thereafter. So it was not long before the pronouncements of colleagues reflected the language of the supposed battles.

Walters's account of the drugs fiasco at the party conference in October 2000 is an excellent illustration of the hopeless inability of both journalists and politicians to tell muddle from menace, but it is also an account of a party fatally fixated on personalities and wars of succession, rather than on the imminent general election, and he captures the climate well. As the principal player in the said debacle, I know that what happened stemmed not from the policy, but from one mammoth - and profoundly ironic - misjudgement of presentation. I had feared that we would be accused of planning decriminalisation because we were proposing the introduction of a fixed penalty fine for an offence that, at the time, carried up to five years in prison; and so, to make it clear that was not intended, I over-toughened the rhetoric in the speech, and David Lidington, my deputy, adopted the same tone in the briefing note. The rest is history, and a comprehensive drugs strategy was caricatured as an attack principally on cannabis users, even though my speech did not once name the wretched weed.

A strong, focused party would have faced down the ensuing uproar, but instead all the weaknesses of the previous three years were magnified hundredfold. The Portillistas were so sure it was all a conspiracy that they told Walters that briefing the press the night before the drugs speech was a deliberate ploy to knock their own hero's speech off the front page. Yet according to Walters, Portillo's speech was also briefed the night before it was delivered. In other words, this was a perfectly normal procedure. It is one of Walters's weaknesses in this book that he often reports claim and counter-claim without standing back to assess the evidence - an inevitable consequence, I suspect, of the modern fashion which demands that works such as this are produced at great speed. It is, after all, only four months since the election.

Hague was a leader of vastly greater merit than has been allowed, and I write as one who did not vote for him in 1997. One of his strongest qualities was calmness and a refusal to panic, and it is this steadiness of nerve that the Conservative Party needs to regain throughout its ranks.

It is good, not bad, if a shadow cabinet contains half a dozen people who are sufficiently outstanding to be talked of as future leaders, because it means that there is quality in its ranks. There is no inherent contradiction in appealing to a core vote and reaching out to a broader electorate. An emphasis on law and order, for example, will especially benefit those trying to live decent lives in deprived inner-city areas. A wide range of views is beneficial, not detrimental, because it indicates a party with a broad base.

Walters shows only too graphically that the steadiness to appreciate all of that was often lacking, but he is right, too, when he highlights some of the sterile policy debates that rumbled on for years without being brought to a firm conclusion. Throughout my time in the shadow cabinet, we argued endlessly about whether we could seize the high ground from Labour on the issues of health and education, never reaching a conclusion, and that policy stagnation, not factionalism, was our biggest single weakness.

When the history of the past ten years comes to be written in academic detail, I suspect that the televising of parliament and the reduction in our hours of work will stand out as the two greatest agents in destroying esprit de corps. Hardly anyone comes into the chamber now unless he wishes to speak himself, or unless it is a great set-piece occasion such as the Budget. We can watch each other on television in our rooms as we work, and that is what we do. Gone, too, are the gatherings in the tearoom in the early hours of the morning when we were all too tired to go on slaving at our desks. Some of the best strategies are thought up as a result of conversations in the Mess.

Walters mentions neither of these factors, but esprit de corps matters more to the defeated army than to the victorious one, and they should not be overlooked. Meanwhile, our party has a choice: steady the nerve and fight the real enemy, or panic at every adverse wind and fight itself. It is our choice: no one else can make it for us.

Ann Widdecombe was shadow home secretary from 1999-2001

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