Well, you can't accuse the Tories of not trying. Having provided us (or me, at least) with a regular supply of richly comic leaders, from John Major to Michael Howard (taking in William Hague and the peerless Iain Duncan Smith on the way), they've gone one better this time. Or five better, to be precise. OK, they're saying, we may not match Tony Blair for quality, but we can bloody well outnumber him. Five leaders for the price of one. Six if you include Howard. All right, five then.
And so we had our hugely entertaining beauty parade. All that was needed was Eric Morley and his wife to introduce the contestants in daywear, evening wear and swimwear, and a leathery-skinned, permatanned Lothario as one of the judges. The BBC's Daily Politics show duly supplied one. No, not Andrew Neil (good guess, though), but Peter Stringfellow, who sat in as a judge. Now there's a sense of humour for you. Even better, Norman Lamont was sitting alongside, insisting that flagellation was all very well but it had to come to an end sooner or later. Hurrah! Memories of his erstwhile lodger Miss Whiplash flew across my mind. And surely across Neil's mind, too . . .
Asked which leadership candidate he was supporting, Stringfellow said "whoever wins", which neatly sums up the problem. Never mind the policy, just choose somebody. This is dangerous stuff for the Tories, who may end up projecting on to their leader whatever personal preferences and prejudices they wish. They might as well choose an iPod on to which they can each download their own favourite mantras and put on those headphones which obligingly shut out any extraneous noise. As it is, given that the party is desperate to show it's willing to change, it is at least a novelty to have five middle-class white males to choose from. (Not entirely fair: one or two would claim that they're upper middle class.) Perhaps they should break the mould and have a rotating leadership for every day of the week: Foxday, Clarkeday, Rifkindday, Cameronday (dressing down day) and Davisday. If Theresa joined in the fun, they could have the most appropriate day of all: Mayday.
As I've said before in this space, form suggests that the Tories will vote not for a leader, but against the others. I still think there'll be a surprise or two yet. I'd wondered if they would fall into the trap of electing their next leader to fight Labour's last one; but Ken Clarke and David Cameron made it clear that they see Gordon Brown as their principal opponent. Naturally, this does assume that when Tony Blair declared this to be his last term, he was telling the truth - always a risky assumption. It is ironic, though, that just as Labour spent its conference wondering how on earth the party could get rid of Blair, the Tories spent theirs trying to find the candidate most like him: Cameron (young and charismatic), David Davis ("the many not the few"), Liam Fox (alarmingly right wing), Malcolm Rifkind (ah! those Edinburgh-educated lawyers!) or Clarke, who does the Blair thing of pretending to listen to the party before telling the members to fuck off. I did find myself warming to Rifkind, speaking without notes and with a good joke about Christopher Columbus ("if he was a Liberal Democrat he'd have discovered the mid-Atlantic"). If the Tory leader is going to be a joke, he might as well be able to tell one.
By midweek, I found myself thinking that this pageant, amusing as it is, may in fact do the Tories no harm, as it at least puts their best cards on public display. Rifkind and Clarke showed themselves to be class conference performers, and Cameron managed to make Tony Blair look old. He calls himself the Coca-Cola candidate ("the real thing"). I'd say he'd be better named after a firm of accountants: Earnest and Young.
A final thought, inspired by Ken Clarke, who does swaggering confidence better than anyone. If Labour claims to be the party of the entrepreneur, then Clarke's Tories would be the party of the entrepreneur-neur-nuh-neur-neur.
Bremner, Bird and Fortune is on Channel 4 (Sundays, 8pm)
