NO matter how much he may speak of sour grapes, Tory leader William Hague will do well to pay heed to the criticism of him today by John Maples who was sacked as Shadow Foreign Secretary in his reshuffle two weeks ago.

For, whether or not he is a bitter man, Mr Maples is right.

Hague has taken the Conservatives too far to the right to win the support of mainstream voters and so consigns the party to long years in the wilderness unless he realises this.

He need look no further than the Tories' miserable ratings in the opinion polls - going down even when way-ahead Labour is slipping - to understand how out of touch the party is with the moderate majority.

But if he looks back in history, he will see that he is leading the Conservatives into the same sort of wasteland of unelectability from which it took Labour almost 20 years to extricate themselves after they took an ideological lurch far from the centre ground.

In their case, it was too far to the left - when after Jim Callaghan's defeat in 1979, the party's crackpot creed of unilateralism and the loony-leftism of Militant Tendency drove the voters away.

To recover, three general elections later, Labour had to become the centrist party that the Tories once were.

Yet, just as this warning comes, Mr Hague embarks on his "Save the Pound" campaign across the country - demonstrating how much the party is in thrall to the euro-sceptics on the right .

He misreads the voters' mood. Yes, most don't want the euro, but most still want to be in the EU.

And most might change their minds on the euro if, by the time they have to decide, it is a stronger and more stable currency.

Besides, it is not an issue now.

Because of the disparity between the strength of the pound and the euro the issue has been kicked into the long grass and Tony Blair will do his best to ensure that it stays there at the next election.

Just as Mr Maples points out, though, what are issues here and now for the voters are health, education, crime and the economy.

And if he and his party cannot at present exploit Labour's troubles on at least two of those scores - the NHS, with queues of heart patients literally dying for lack of treatment, and crime, when offences, particularly violent ones, are shooting up - then they are badly out of touch.

Instead of engaging in this mistimed ideological obsession over Europe, Mr Hague would do well to ask voters from the back of his campaign lorry if they know which member of the Shadow Cabinet looks after health.

The ignorant response would tell him in a flash just how remote is the party from the people.

It was back in 1994 that Mr Maples told his party that voters saw it as arrogant and out of touch with people and their priorities.

It did not listen and look what happened.

He is repeating the warning now and Mr Hague had better listen.

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