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.’