Will the tory members get it right this time and elect someone who has half a chance of winning the next election? (or at least put Labour under pressure for the next four years). It will partly depend on what choice the MPs give them. The most likely scenario is a Cameron v Davis final. The general consensus is, that whoever Cameron is up against he will emerge as the winner. But what if a little bit of tactical voting goes on in rounds one or two? Is it possible that Cameron could be voted out this week and we'll be left with a Davis v Clarke final, or even worse a Davis v Fox final. After what happened to hot favourite Michael Portillo in 2001 nothing can be taken for granted. In the leadership election of 2001 Portillo had led the field by 10 and 8 votes in the first two rounds only to lose out on the reaching the membership vote when he finished one vote behind IDS in round three.
It's most likely Cameron will be elected leader in early December. I don't see the same happening to him as happened to Portillo. Some believe that Portillo was the victim of tactical voting, which isn't unlikely as the voting was very close. I think Cameron has strong enough support to avoid being prematurely ejected from the election in the same way. He has managed to keep the momentum going since his conference speech even though he has had "the question" weighing down on his shoulders for the past week. It's interesting to see that the issue regarding "the question" has had no obvious negative effect on his campaign. Five years ago it would have had a noticable detrimental effect.
His refusal to answer the question about drugs could well have had the opposite effect and brought his campaign to a halt and ended any hopes he had of becoming leader. It seemed that common sense thing to do would have been to answer the question as early on as possible to get it out of the way to prevent it hindering a crucial stage of the election campaign. I don't personally believe it would have done him any harm to have done that. But doing that would have almost certainly given the story a shorter shelf life and the amount of media exposure that Cameron had last week wouldn't have come about without it. Could the refusal to answer actually have been a brilliant piece of campaign strategy by the Cameron team to make sure their candidate would remain in the media spotlight all last week knowing his profile would be significantly raised among the general public with the story being prominently broadcast on every television, radio and newspaper for the duration of the story's life. The fact that very few people actually knew who he was had it's effect on the opinion polls. Clarke did well in the polling of the general public simply because he was the most well known Tory in the leadership line-up. Clarke is popular, there's no doubt about that, but I wonder how popular he will be after a year or two as leader. I feel he'd run out of steam if he should be unexpectedly elected leader. He would be a novelty for a while but for longer term success Cameron has to be the one chosen from the four candidates. As for Davis, he is summed up perfectly in the following...
"IDS with hair"
If the MPs don't give the members the choice of voting Cameron then they will effectively be handing Gordon Brown the keys to number 10 four years before the election even takes place.The current odds are
Cameron 4/9 - Davis 11/4 - Fox 8/1 - Clarke 14/1.
Fox should do better than many forecasts suggest as he takes on board some of those covertly fleeing from Davis' rapdily sinking ship.Liam Fox: "The George Bush of UK politics" (well, thats what they claim.. but they are usually Lib-Dem supporters)
I was impressed at how well Cameron dealt with "the question" question on last Thursday's Question Time, and the audience appeared to be warm towards the tory former Etonian throughout the whole programme, despite QT coming from Stanley, County Durham (which can hardly be considered to be a tory heartland). Rather than the drugs issue hindering his campaign it appears to have actually helped it which is illustrated clearly in the ever-tightening odds on a Cameron victory. In the aftermath of the QT I've become increasingly confident that Cameron will win the leadership vote (as long as he isn't knifed in the back by tactical voting)
Cameron managed to get through the weekend without any of the Sunday papers publishing evidence which could have killed his leadership hopes. He did seem very confident prior to the weekend that nothing was going to trip him up despite the fact that at least two sunday papers were supposedly digging deep to find something incriminating. Maybe he had absolute confidence that there was nothing to be found.
Cameron is the only one of the candidates who will be able lead the tories to an election victory in four years time (with plenty of hard work and a little luck)
Save the Conservative party (from itself)
Here's my prediction for the first round.
Davis 62
Cameron 56
Fox 40
Clarke 38
Bye Bye Ken.
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