What a humiliation for Michael Howard and Tory party chairman, the Horsham MP Francis Maude, in failing to garner sufficient support to force a change in the rules governing the selection of Tory party leader.

It serves them right, though, for trying to imply it was grassroots members (such as myself) who were primarily responsible for the disastrous choice of Iain Duncan Smith.

What Mr Howard and Mr Maude would wish us to forget is it was Conservative MPs - the very people now claiming they alone should have the vote because they know the candidates intimately - who were responsible (in 2001) for offering grassroots members the straight choice between Mr Duncan Smith and Kenneth Clarke.

If Duncan Smith - who now seems to have become a convenient scapegoat for all the party's ills - was quite as embarrassing as his Tory parliamentary colleagues are now falling over themselves to tell us, he should never have made it on to any shortlist.

In the wake of its third successive General Election defeat, one would have thought the Conservative party might have more important matters to discuss than the method by which it chooses its leader.

And can the party hierarchy not see the irony that, while enthusiastically advocating democracy in such far-flung places as Afghanistan, Zimbabwe and Iraq, it's clearly terrified of embracing such a concept much closer to home in the running of its own affairs?

If you're not prepared to listen to and trust your own party workers, is it really any wonder that the majority of the electorate remains highly sceptical of once again entrusting the Conservative party with the exercise of power?

-Peter Lilley, Hove