The intervention from Rifkind, considered a potential candidate for the leadership if Howard falters, will be seen as setting out his own stall. But it could also make uncomfortable reading in Downing Street, where the Prime Minister's speech blaming Sixties values for a rise in anti-social behaviour raised eyebrows. Aides now privately accept that the rhetoric was overblown, particularly since the Sixties generation of 'baby boomers' are a crucial electoral group who may not take kindly to being lectured.
Writing in The Observer, Rifkind says the Tories should position themselves as libertarian defenders of the nation's freedom against an authoritarian, killjoy government. 'Britain has the most intolerant Home Secretary that we have had for a generation. We have had a Prime Minister who preaches, incessantly, and who is indifferent to the erosion of our traditional freedoms,' he says.
'Under Labour we have people imprisoned without trial. We are all to be required to carry identity cards, though that will not have the slightest effect on any terrorist or serious criminal.'
His words reflect frontbench calls for a new strategy of being tough on public order, but libertarian about private acts - rejecting bans on smacking in the home, for example, but tackling loutishness in the street.
They follow what Rifkind - who lost his parliamentary seat in 1997 and is now expected to return as Tory candidate for the safe seat of Kensington and Chelsea - admitted had been 'a bad week' for the leader. A YouGov poll on Friday suggested the Tories are actually doing worse under Howard than under the much-maligned Iain Duncan Smith, while the party was jolted earlier in the week by bungled attempts to persuade older Tory MPs to stand down and free up safe seats.
The row was triggered by a list of so-called 'bedblockers' - medical slang for elderly patients who cannot be sent home - published by Daily Telegraph leader writer George Trefgarne, who is close to Howard's chief of staff, Rachel Whetstone, and several other ambitious young Tories. However it backfired badly, prompting threats of legal action from older MPs, one of whom, Derek Conway, blamed what he called a 'Notting Hill set' of affluent west London Tories.
Trefgarne's intervention has privately infuriated some in his supposed set, with Whetstone said to be angry at being dragged into the row. 'Any chance that they [the bedblockers] might have gone has now disappeared altogether,' said one.
Beneath the froth lies genuine frustration among young Tories at the lack of available safe seats. For those unwilling, given the fragile state of the party's electoral fortunes, to fight marginal seats, a desperate game of musical chairs has ensued.
Promising candidates chasing too few seats include Nick Hurd, the son of former cabinet minister Douglas; Greg Clark, a chief policy aide at Conservative Central Office; Laura Sandys, a PR consultant with a family connection to Winston Churchill; Steve Hilton, a former advertising whizz kid now working as adviser to Lord Saatchi, and Nadim Zawahi, an executive with pollsters YouGov.
Hopes are being pinned on the one remaining safe seat of Ruislip Northwood, where the sitting MP, John Wilkinson, is to stand down.
A rare greater London seat with a majority of 7,500, it is set to attract applications 'by the sackful', one insider said. But there is already a frontrunner: Daniel Finkelstein, the Diet Coke-guzzling former policy chief to William Hague, now a leader writer at the Times.
