While Neil Kinnock and Margaret Thatcher are in the Lords, John Major is on the US lecture circuit, and William Hague is reaping the rewards as an after-dinner speaker, Iain Duncan Smith has ploughed something of a lonely furrow as an ex-party leader, setting up his own thinktank, the Centre for Social Justice, aimed at putting compassion back into Conservativsm.
Today he launches his own heartfelt report on how the Tories can fight poverty, entitled Good for Me, Good for My Neighbour, admitting that "the problems for the Conservative party are profound ... but not terminal".
As he hints in his Guardian interview today, Mr Duncan Smith says the Labour party is like the NHS and the United Nations, in that it has "a set of values that commands more loyalty than its actual performance merits. It's ideals inspire and reassure".
He goes on: "New Labour have successfully presented themselves as competent whilst losing the perception of being compassionate. Conservatives, meanwhile,have lost their reputation for competence and have still not acquired a reputation for compassion."
While there's no doubting IDS's evident sincerity, the report is better on rhetoric than concrete policy ideas. That said, the man who first pioneered the term "compassionate conservative", George W Bush (and who is pictured with the ex-Tory leader on the CSJ website), seems to have fared quite well electorally ...
