FULL of ham and hyperbole it may have been, but Tory conference delegates just loved Defence Minister Michael Portillo's guns-blazing attack on Europe yesterday.

Everything from imagined EU metrication assaults on our forces' cap badges to the spectre of Brussels putting the lives of British troops at risk came under his withering fire.

And for the Blackpool battalions of Union Jack-wavers the fact that Brussels does not control our defence policy and that many other countries are moving away from the notion of a federal Europe made no difference.

No matter how fanciful Mr Portillo's lyrics were, his stirring song was still music to their ears.

Nonetheless this platform pantomime did underscore a couple of things.

The first is that Rule Britannia is now the Conservatives' theme tune for the general election.

As signalled earlier by isolationist noises from Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind and endorsed by John Major's approval for Mr Portillo's anti-Brussels barrage, the Tories are hoping to trump Labour with the Euro-sceptic card in the coming campaign.

But if this is a triumph for the Tory right, it also marks Mr Portillo's emergence as the focus of that faction - a position he had perhaps earlier lost, or tactically abandoned, when John Redwood challenged Mr Major for the party leadership.

Thus, while heartily applauding the unashamed nationalism of Mr Portillo's speech yesterday, Mr Major needs also to be aware that he was endorsing the Defence Secretary's barely-disguised ambition to be not just the leader of the Tory right, but the next leader of the whole party.

And defeat at the general election - with Britain's relations with Europe a key issue in the outcome - might just be part of Mr Portillo's plan to triumph personally from the anti-Brussels ploy.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.