IAN Duncan Smith has warned his party that the Conservatives must "unite or die". The fact is that the Conservative Party died on May 1, 1997 when the British people consigned all that they stood for to the dustbin of history.

A new generation of voters who had known only Tory Government in their adult lives and had reached middle age by 1997 saw through the creed of selfishness and greed preached by the Tories under Margaret Thatcher.

It extended to corruption on the part of some MPs under the weak leadership of John Major, and a staggering level of hypocrisy recently illuminated by the revelations of the Major-Curry affair and Major's trumpeting of "family

values".

Duncan Smith stated that the Conservatives' standing as an opposition and an alternative government was at stake. That would be the case if the Tories had a molecule of a chance of ever governing again, which they do not. Not only did New Labour defeat them in 1997, but they also replaced them.

What the Tories are seeking to do is the impossible. Whether they know it or not, they are trying to "modernise" themselves into the image of New

Labour, a "party" in which their "modernising" MPs would feel completely at home.

Those who would not represent a rump of obsolete old-style Tory reactionaries whose withering support in the country can only be put down to the fact that people are living longer.

At present, there is no alternative government to New Labour except the Labour Party itself, if and when its members decide to deliver Members of Parliament who would give the people what they voted for in 1997, the

Labour government they were expecting.

PETER NIELSEN, Worcester.