Cameron 'will not flinch' from change

In the wake of the internal party row over grammar schools, the Tory leader said the past few weeks had not been as smooth as he would have liked.

But he promised that the revolt - including the resignation of a shadow minister - would not distract his efforts to move the Conservatives back to the centre ground.

Mr Cameron said he had already made "serious changes" to the Tories which had brought them into the mainstream and achieved "huge success" in May's local elections.

"We are succeeding, doing well," he told the BBC. "Of course the last couple of weeks haven't been as smooth as I'd like, but when the smoke clears and you look at what's happening, it's the Conservative Party in the centre ground, there for everybody, while Labour is lurching off to the left in a deputy leadership contest that's all about tax rises and trade union powers and the rest of it."

Mr Cameron accepted that he could be "impatient" in his desire for change in the Conservative Party.

He continued: "Sometimes that can mean you do have to explain more to your party and the country exactly why the changes are so important, but I'm not going to flinch, I'm not going to stop in making the changes."

Mr Cameron ran into trouble with sections of his party after saying there would be no extension of selective state schooling under the Tories.

Shadow education secretary David Willetts' admission last week that more grammar schools might be built in areas where they already exist was portrayed by political opponents as a U-turn to head off a growing rebellion.

Alan Johnson, Education Secretary and deputy Labour leadership hopeful, said: "David Cameron should own up and admit that he caved into the pressure from his unchanged and unreformed party. This was David Cameron's first big test of leadership and he flunked it."