Why Mr Duncan refuses to drop his knickers

Mr Alan Duncan, the Conservative transport spokesman, announcing in the Daily Telegraph his candidacy for the party leadership, was quoted as likening the Tories’ situation to Marks & Spencer’s: ‘…a fantastic brand in good times, but if you have a lousy CEO and lousy knickers you don’t do well, and like M&S we need both a good brand and better knickers’.

The vivid analogy aroused a certain disapproval among the party’s primmer spirits. Whereupon Mr Duncan used it again a few days later. Anyone falling asleep to BBC Radio Four’s indispensable World Tonight — falling asleep not because of the content but because of the lateness of the hour — would have heard him explaining again that the Tories were just like M&S and ‘we’ve just gotta have better knickers’. Mr Duncan was simply refusing to let knickers be, so to speak, dropped.

I sought the opinion of Mr Francis Maude. He is the dynamic new CEO of Cameron & Osborne, the high-street giant which is in a takeover bid for the Conservative party against Davis’s, the so-called ‘people’s chain’.