By Nyta Mann BBC News Online political correspondent

Iain Duncan Smith arrives for his party's "away day"

For all the bold talk of gearing up to win the next election, the shine was rather taken off Iain Duncan Smith's "away day" for Conservative MPs before it started.

The original plan, hatched ahead of last week's elections, was for a morale-boosting get-together that would usefully serve several functions for the Tory leadership.

It would provide a platform for Mr Duncan Smith to further trumpet the good news story - and there have been precious few of those around lately - of his party's local election gains.

With normal service resumed on the political front following the Iraq war, it would also be a handy launchpad for the strategy of promoting the Tories as standing for "a fair deal for everyone".

And any post-poll plotting to oust the Conservative leader would be more difficult to conduct under the gaze of party managers.

Almost inevitably, it hasn't quite worked out like that.

Gains

First, those local elections. The party won an extra 500-plus council seats. The Tories always knew they were going to emerge with gains to trumpet - and well above the preposterous "target" of 30 extra seats that party chairman Theresa May and others publicly set themselves before polling day. Whether those 500-plus gains are actually impressive is another matter altogether.

Bearing in mind the massive council seat losses of 1995, which were only partially recouped four years later in 1999, the Tories were always going to have to make gains in the hundreds if they were to credibly claim they were making progress.

Next, the clear launchpad for the party's "fair deal" strategy. The internal revolt over Mr Duncan Smith's appointment of Barry Legg as the party's chief executive has put the mockers on that to a degree.

To make matters worse, some of the gathered troops are also muttering about the reported �160,000 pay-off for Mr Legg, who held the job for a grand total of three months.

Will the cash-strapped party have to pay for the cost of an appointment its board was never consulted on? Or is Mr Duncan Smith, having made the personal appointment, personally liable?

The plots that bond

Last but not least, what of the plotting? "Bonding or plotting are nothing to do with it," Mr Duncan Smith declared when he arrived in Buckinghamshire on Friday morning.

He said the public are uninterested in press chatter about splits - and he may have a point.

But no Tory gathering whose attendance runs beyond single figures is complete without some plotting, though bonding tends to be regarded as optional. "It's what we do - it is the way we bond," sighs one Conservative MP.

Thanks to a combination of the fog of war in Iraq having obscured Tory woes, Crispin Blunt's mistimed call to mutiny and better than trailed council gains, the leadership contest inked into some Conservative diaries for this month has been postponed. That doesn't mean it won't take place later on.

Those who want a leadership change are roughly split into two camps.

The sooner-the-better camp fears that the longer the task is left undone, the more difficult it becomes.

The wait-and-see faction wants to let the discontent rise from the grassroots up, and believes that sentiment will return once the warm glow of the local elections is replaced by cold dread of approaching general election disaster.

As his MPs were gathering in Buckinghamshire Mr Duncan Smith was candidly telling the Spectator magazine: "We don't love each other."

A more frank answer might have been that a good number of them plain detest each other. But they are willing to go through a little bonding while they bide their time.