Getting out of a right-wing pickle?

"CAN you tell me where the Conservatives are?" the barman at the Pitcher and Piano pub at the Newcastle foot of the Millennium Bridge is asked above the pounding 'background' music.

"What?" he replies in best Geordie, genuinely mystified. "D'you mean jam, like?"

"No, not conserves or preservatives - just Conservatives. Iain Duncan Smith, where is he?"

"Oh, aye, I heard something about them being upstairs."

But the barman's right. The Conservatives are in a jam, and at the end of an awful week their leader, Mr Duncan Smith, found himself in Newcastle, buttering up the North-East party activists who helped elect him to the job little more than a year ago.

On television, Mr Duncan Smith always has a mournful air about him, as if he were a funeral director. Perhaps that's why at the start of the week, after the embarrassing backbench rebellion on the Adoption Bill, he called on his colleagues to "unite or die".

"The party needs to come together to focus on the Government and if we don't we will cease to be an alternative government," he says. "We will kick around in opposition for years and years and years - but that's not a state of being. The only purpose of being an opposition is to get into government. If our hopes and aspirations are not to die, if they are to be in government, we need to make sure that nothing stands in our way in presenting a concerted solid face of opposition to the present Government and a clear alternative."

He feels that, despite the "flurry" of the last week, his party is ready to present "a clear Conservative agenda".

"Everything I do, everything I talk about, is reforming the public services," he says. "Last year in this country, 250,000 people had to go and buy their treatment from the private sector because they couldn't get their operations in time on the NHS. We have waiting lists that are as long as they have ever been. You have real problems in elderly care. We have the closure of care home beds at record levels and bed-blocking as a result in the hospitals.

"The health service is in a real mess, and the Government has presided over that for five years. Actually, it has got worse since they took over."

He segues into education problems, of tens of thousands of children leaving school without qualifications, before effortlessly arriving at law and order.

"We want to get more police back on the streets, and when they arrest criminals, they get longer sentences and within those sentences - which the Government isn't doing - there is proper rehabilitation. In this country we have the highest level of youth re-offending in the western world. About 76 per cent of young offenders go on to commit a second or third crime. In America it is no worse than 40 per cent, in other countries it is in the low twenties. Our prisons are full of young people committing second or third crimes, and our streets are full of young people back on them committing violent crime."

Another Conservative area of attack is going to be the proposed regional assemblies. With the region as a whole not sold on the idea, Mr Duncan Smith's pondering on how the south of the North-East will like being ruled from Newcastle, and how it will like losing some of its local council powers to the regional body, and how it will like bearing the expense, may cause some ears to open to him.

"There is a feeling that people don't have enough control over things that happen up here," he agrees, "and you have to break down Whitehall and push it down to the local councils and further down to give headteachers greater powers to run their schools and to ignore targets if necessary, to give parents greater choice and the power to set up their own schools.

"So I'm talking about power going right down and not about creating a new centre of power like an assembly."

In the Labour-dominated North-East, he says someone has to air these alternatives. But there are only a smattering of Conservative councillors and the few remaining MPs are scattered around the rural periphery.

"There are far too many places in the North-East where we hold far too few council seats," he says. "I can only think that there is a preconceived notion that the Conservatives are not likely to benefit people up here. That may be the notion of a lot of the public but I have to say I don't think they have looked at the Conservatives for a long, long time in local government."

Despite the ravages of the Thatcher years, he hopes for a kindly look from the region.

"I can't fight the elections of ten or 20 years ago," he says, heatedly. "By the time we reach the next election, the Government will have been in power for at least nine years. Nine years in government! Don't you think they should take some responsibility? Don't you think there are problems they are to blame for? For how long are we to go on saying that only the Conservatives are to blame for things that people did not like?"

But after the last week, only the most generous will have been persuaded to give the Conservatives a second glance. However, it is impossible not to at least admire Mr Duncan Smith's thick-skinned bravery. Even after the mauling of the last few days, he's still taking the questions and tackling the issues.

"You enjoy some weeks, you don't enjoy others, and you just get on and do your job," he says, affecting his best matter-of-fact manner. But then he walks towards the Millennium Bridge to have his picture taken: his is not a purposeful stride, but his hands are in his pockets and his head is slightly bowed - even allowing for the weather, this is a man who looks to have the cares of the world weighing heavy on his shoulders.

YESTERDAY, his woes were added to by another ghost from the past. Former Cabinet minister and figure of fun David Mellor, who played away from home in his Chelsea shirt before getting sacked when he was caught offside, wrote an excoriating article in the London Evening Standard. It was headlined "No change, no chance", and it alleged that "IDS has the thinnest CV of any major party leader in a generation".

When Mr Mellor's views are mentioned, for the first time our interview stops being stern and Mr Duncan Smith suggests that beneath his straight exterior there's a glimmer of a sense of humour.

"The interesting thing about politics is that David Mellor has an opinion," he says, spotting a softer target. "I wasn't aware that people like David Mellor were actually involved regularly in politics today. I can remember David Mellor's own particular problems didn't exactly cause the Conservative Party a great surge of support, so advice from David - with respect - is advice I will leave behind me.

"I'll just get on with the job I know I have got to do, which is rebuilding the Conservative Party's fortunes, and that, I'm afraid, is the long and short of it."

Only a psychoanalyst could explain why that "I'm afraid" was slipped into his last sentence.