What finished Iain Duncan Smith was not that his party was doing worse than anyone thought possible under his leadership, but that for the first time in years there was a glimmer of hope. It was Catch-22 for the Tory leader. The more convincingly upbeat his depiction of the party's prospects, the more he put the idea into the heads of his MPS that they would probably do even better without him. In the early summer, there was scarcely any talk of replacing him. A moment of incipient insurrection the previous autumn had quickly blown itself out. There was a flare-up of anger when, subsequently, Mr Duncan Smith purged the party organisation of apparatchiks he considered to be disloyal. The comings and goings at Central Office eventually landed the party with a ￡500,000 compensation bill it could ill afford, but despite unhappy mutterings, there was little in the way of plotting.
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