Tony Blair has rarely been off the TV or out of the newspapers since the atrocities in America on September 11.

His almost presidential image was reinforced during his speech to the Labour conference in Brighton on Tuesday.

Almost unnoticed, the Tories have ended months of infighting and chosen a new leader who will be thrust, blinking and untested, into the political limelight at the party conference in Blackpool next week.

It's a tough time to be a Conservative after a second enormous general election defeat, with public apathy towards politics in general and suggestions put about by the chattering classes that the Tories might even be replaced by the Liberal Democrats as the main opposition party.

You have only to look at the political map of Sussex to see how things have changed. Over most of the second half of the last century every parliamentary seat was Conservative. During the Eighties nearly all were held by five-figure majorities. Most councils were also solidly Tory.

Now, all three Brighton and Hove seats are held by Labour, as are Crawley and Hastings, while Norman Baker has established himself as a Lib Dem MP in the Tory heartland of Lewes.

Although the Tories have made a comeback to take over some local authorities, such as the two county councils, many others, like Brighton and Hove, Hastings, Lewes and Crawley, are held firmly by politicians of other parties.

Iain Duncan Smith is not widely known at present but that may have changed by this time next week. It would be easy to underrate him as the pundits did Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher, who both defied them to become prime minister.

But he follows William Hague, who achieved the unenviable distinction this year of becoming only the second Tory leader in the last century (the other was Austen Chamberlain) not to succeed to the highest office in the land. He is almost obliged during the coming days, months or years to support the Government's onslaught against the Taliban.

He looks like an older and less assertive Hague, an important factor in these televisual times. He knows that two-fifths of his party members would have preferred the better-known Kenneth Clarke. He has to face huge cracks over Europe and the single currency.

Iain Duncan Smith could surprise us all. Because he is so unknown, he arrives at the top with little baggage. Because the party is so down, he can take radical measures to pull it up again. Because so many old ministers have gone, he can tap new talent for his shadow team.

But he must avoid veering too far to the Right. There are disturbing signs in some of his appointments that he may do, although his rhetoric points the other way. If he turns sharp Right, he enters a cul-de-sac with fascism at the end and a hugely negative voting appeal.

To entertain any hope of regaining power, he has to re-enter the centre ground of politics already overcrowded with new Labour and the Liberal Democrats. But that is where most ordinary, civilised people, little interested in politics, are.

He will also have to get rid of the ghost of Margaret Thatcher. Dominant throughout the Eighties, she has since fallen further and faster in political esteem than any other prime minister in recent history. Her enthusiastic support would turn off millions of possible Tory voters.

With time, luck and judgment, Iain Duncan Smith can help Conservatives clamber back into their traditional role as a party of government.

The alternative is being banished to the fringe with British politics following an American alignment of centre Right and centre Left parties.