Chris Christie lays down a marker for the 2016 US presidential election

Ties between the Tories and the Republicans have rarely been weaker than they are today. The hiring of Jim Messina, Barack Obama’s campaign manager, is another sign that the Tories are more interested in the technical effectiveness of the Obama machine than they are in anything that the Republicans are producing.

I suspect that the Republican most likely to revive Tory interest in the GOP, its idea and its electoral strategy, is Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey. Christie is neither a southern Republican nor a Tea Party man. Rather, he’s a north eastern Republican with a more emollient attitude to government.

Christie is up for re-election in New Jersey this autumn, a contest that he’s expected to win easily. And it looks like he will indeed run for the Republican nomination for 2016. Christie has chosen to reveal to Dan Balz, the author of a highly anticipated book on the 2012 US presidential election, how hard the GOP establishment tried to draft him into the race in 2012.