The Tory beauty contest is enough to bring on an attack of terminal revulsion

Meanwhile, back at the Tory party, they are still looking for a new leader. Thanks to the perceived brilliance of the Prime Minister — he has fed Africa, secured the 2012 Olympics and now crossed the Rhine in what the editor of this organ prefers not to call the war on terrorism — many Tory MPs have lost interest in the not unimportant question of who will succeed Michael Howard. Until Mr Blair resigns, it’s game off. One or two leadership candidates privately profess admiration for him. One ex-minister, almost unique in not yet being a candidate himself, told me this was ‘the most f—ing depressing period in the party’s history’. Another, a former long-serving whip, retailed with astonishment his impressions of an article in praise of David Davis that he had read in a supposedly serious newspaper. ‘Once I reached the bits that I knew about,’ said the ex-whip, who has observed the heir presumptuous at close quarters over several years, ‘I realised it was absolute bollocks.’ Just to even things up, two veteran supporters of David Cameron professed that even if he were to win he would be ‘shredded’ by the media within a year as William Hague was, because of his inexperience.

An observation from another ex-frontbencher, though, was the most pertinent. ‘We have stopped thinking. We have stopped offering any idea of what we might stand for. We have nothing new to offer.’ Despite the publication of articles, and even pamphlets, by would-be leaders, and interviews of various degrees of cheesiness in which they have been able to share their world view, he is right. One such pamphlet, by Mr Michael Ancram (as the Marquess of Lothian still oddly insists on calling himself), does indeed admit that the party’s failure at the last three elections ‘was largely because the vast majority of the British people did not know what a Conservative really was or what we stood for’.