Well, I think a lot of the One Nation Conservatives will not feel that their place any longer is in the Conservative Party."A senior Labour Party source suggested earlier that there could be further defections afoot. But for a large part of the party, however, they see it drifting further and further to the Right, and there will be a lot of One Nation Tories who are dissatisfied."They have carried on in a situation where they still will not choose between the wish to carry on with the policies of the 1980s and Thatcherism, or whether they wish to return to the centre-ground, and they have not decided that."But most of the direction appears to be moving to the Right, and that is the dominant strain of the Tory party. And there are other areas where we've got to make sense of the modern world."Mr Blair cited the position taken by the Government on student finance - "Another very good example of that which is a difficult and hard decision."He said: "The only way we are going to get additional resources into the university system and allow larger numbers of students is if we change the system of finance, where the state will provide a fair framework."The Prime Minister would not be drawn on the application of those principles to other areas of welfare - like the burgeoning bill for disability benefits - but Government sources argue that part of Labour's current popularity is built on the public recognition that a sound foundation is being made for the future.There is also a strong element of the Prime Minister making use of the unique political scene - a combination of a landslide majority in May, a new deal of co-operation with the Liberal Democrats, who attend their first meeting of the "Lab-Dem" Cabinet committee on constitutional reform tomorrow; and the continuing turmoil in the Tory ranks.With the defection of former MP Hugh Dykes in yesterday's headlines, leading figures like Lord Tebbit questioning William Hague's experience, and Kenneth Clarke appealing for an end to "carping", the new Conservative leader last night delivered a hastily arranged speech to party activists in an attempt to get a grip on his party.But Mr Blair told The Independent: "The Conservatives still haven't decided what type of political party they are. No decisions had yet been taken on reform of the Welfare State, but he added: "The basic principle is that the role of government is to organise proper levels of social provision."Some may be done directly through the private sector, some through the public sector, some may be done by a combination of public-private sector."I don't think anyone seriously believes that pension provision in the future is going to be the preserve solely of the public sector It isn't. The Government had already taken tough action on the economy: giving the Bank of England independence to set interest rates, and by cutting the budget deficit, national debt and public borrowing.

It is possible for us to create a country of greater opportunity, provided we set aside some of the problems we have had in the past and provided the Labour Party and the Labour Government is concentrated on addressing the real concerns of people, rather than slipping backwards."But he warned that there were hard choices ahead. Our Political Editor reports on the Prime Minister's new ``test for the millennium'' and his post-election programme, to be unveiled at this month's Labour conference. An ambitious three-pronged programme to "create a country that can hold its head high as the model of what a 21st-Century developed nation should be," was last night outlined by the Prime Minister.Speaking from Chequers, Mr Blair said the three key elements, which will be used to focus the Labour conference later this month, were a competitive economy built not on low wages, but high skills, and the creativity of a well-educated workforce; a society "where we are getting rid of this idea of an underclass, a set of people apart from the rest of society"; and an end to the years of Conservative isolationism in world affairs.Mr Blair said: "All those things are achievable. Tony Blair last night committed himself to an ambitious programme to rid Britain of the underclass he inherited in May. In an interview with The Independent he warned of more tough decisions ahead on the Welfare State, and indicated that private companies could be involved in his reforms of it. Wouldn't the guests be more taken off guard if life and theatrics were less crisply separated? Otherwise, this is a production of Hay Fever that's not to be sneezed at.. Tucking into their cake at teatime, they positively glow with contentment, quite blind to the discomfort of their empty-handed, inhibited guests (Hannah Cresswell Gulliford, Tim Meats and Adrian Sharp).The cast are all very good and my one minor cavil with the direction is the decision to have the Blisses rush to the stage-like raised area with the piano when they shock the rest of the party by heading off, unannounced, into the last scene of Love's Whirlwind. There's a curious innocence to the gesture; it's rather like eavesdropping on a child during an unguarded interval in a let's-pretend fantasy.Adams and her arty family (Frank Barrie, Lara Bobross and Matthew Carter) expertly communicate the fact that, for all their petty internal quibblings, the Blisses are united against the rest of the world in the strength of their serene self-absorption.

At one point, poised between two bouts of arch role-play, she even cools off by blowing down the front of her glittering evening dress. Adam's performance emphasises the sheer pleasure Judith gets from the game of disconcerting innocent guests with displays of utterly trumped-up emotion. It's like an inadvertently subservient parade of the shameless theatricalising of her employers.Polly Adams brings just the right quality of bright, unnerving feyness to the role of Judith, the actress who has forgotten how to have an emotion that doesn't veer off into the melodramatics and sentimentality of one of her old parts in stagy trash like Love's Whirlwind. Preparing the breakfast table for the last act, she gets to tap and Charleston and clown around like some stagestruck wannabe Tessie O'Shea (though with rather more delicacy). This production allows her to work off her frustration in an interpolated sequence that turns a scene change into a delightful dance routine. Having been dresser to Judith Bliss, the retired actress vaguely planning a comeback, Clara has rather more in common with this bohemian family than she does with the straiter-laced, separately invited guests who arrive at the Cookham country retreat on Saturday afternoon and sneak away again on Sunday morning after being subjected to an evening of humiliating games and histrionic attitudinising. A ton of formidable, roly-poly disgruntlement in a raffish trailing headband, Ms Kane's Clara stumps around, opening doors that slam straight back in people's faces and looking about as in her element in rural domesticity as a pirate would serving tea at the Admiralty. It's the fact that she and her employers are as insultingly offhand and unconventional as each other that gives Clara and the situation its comic edge in Hay Fever.

"One's dead and the other's in Newcastle," she declares with the connotation that there's nothing to choose between those fates. One thinks of Miss Hodge in Design for Living who waxes all prim and proper about the mistress's love affair with two bisexual men on the grounds that she herself has done things the respectable serial way, chalking up two ex-husbands. Pert, disapproving servants are far from rare in Coward's plays. In the smallest role of Clara, the housekeeper, Patricia Kane damn near steals the show in Gareth Armstrong's highly enjoyable revival of Hay Fever at the Salisbury Playhouse. Wryly, Ann Murray, thinly disguised as Caesar, casts us one last aside extolling the virtues of Cleopatra's hair. He came, he saw, he conquered, but it was the hair that did it Now that's irony, and this show needed more of it.ES. With Catherine Wyn-Rogers (Cornelia) dignified as ever in her suffering, mother and son found heart- aching accord at the close of Act 1.Come the happy ending, artifacts from Cleopatra's Egypt (yes, including her needle) lie wrapped and awaiting transportation to Rome while the deceased leap from their sarcophaguses to join in the festivities.