“GONE BUT NOT forgotten,” we say of dead or dying figures who still cast a shadow over our lives. “Forgotten but not gone” is a more suitable description of the man responsible for the longest running leadership election in political history, Michael Howard.

According to those papers that support him as next leader, Kenneth Clarke has “set the contest alight”. Their evidence? Polls that they commissioned to say so. But the polls are little more than name recognition exercises — Mr Clarke has been around a lot longer, a strength (experience) as well as a weakness (his record). Those same papers portray him as “the man Labour fears”.

Depending on which columnist you read, this title occasionally passes to David Davis or David Cameron, though never, for fairly obvious reasons, to Liam Fox, David Willetts or Sir Malcolm Rifkind.

Sir Malcolm should stand in front of a mirror and ask himself: “Can I imagine myself leading the Tories to victory and becoming Prime Minister?” If he answers yes, he has breached new boundaries in out-of-touchness. Dr Fox is a reasonably handsome doctor capable of stringing sentences together without too many ums and ahs and staying on message in interviews. This skill has its place in politics but it is not sufficient to be Prime Minister. Mr Willetts, despite the Two Brains nickname, has shown no extraordinary nous or judgment.

So we are left with Mr Clarke, Mr Cameron or Mr Davis. At the risk of fuelling the belief that he is the man Labour fears, Mr Clarke is the one Labour should most relish getting stuck into. He has many qualities. He is his own man and a bit of a bruiser. He has been presented in some circles as the Tories’ Mo Mowlam, a tribute to his human touch. But that is insufficient.

He has been Chancellor but the gulf between what is required for that position and the top job is enormous. Unlike Gordon Brown, Mr Clarke is lazy and prone to leave the detail to others. The laziness shows up in his speeches, made for headlines not argument.

He used to infuriate No 10 at weekends in the Major years when he would disappear, watch football, enjoy a few pints, spot a few birds, and nobody could get hold of him. All good for a one-dimensional man-of-the-people image, but not sensible when the Prime Minister needed to speak to you about some key area of your responsibility. The work-rate issue is a real one. In some ways the opposition leader’s job is tougher than any other : you lack the resources of government; you have to be on top of all the policy issues; you have to have a strategic agenda and drive it forward in the face of many who think they can do better.

Tories should also worry about his judgment. Politicians are defined in part by big moments. One of Mr Clarke’s defining moments was his absurd belief that he could cook up a dream ticket with John Redwood in the 1997 leadership contest. His credibility stock slumped that day. His relationship with the tobacco industry is another mistake.

He has exposed his own faulty judgment on three occasions since entering the current race: first, in setting out opposition to the Government’s policy on Iraq without saying what his alternative is; secondly, in thinking that he could redefine his lifelong position on Europe simply by stating that he had changed his mind; thirdly, to announce his candidature in the Daily Mail to generate support from that quarter. The Mail is part of the Tory party’s problem, not part of its solution. The real Ken Clarke loathes the Mail. For Redwood last time, read the Mail this time.

As for Mr Cameron, I know there are those who think I have a bit of a thing about Eton — in so far as it symbolises the apex of an education system that for generations has held back Britain as a classless, meritocratic country, I do. But he knows he will suffer as a result of being an Old Etonian. He looks and sounds like a traditional Tory toff because that is what he has been bred to be. He and George Osborne like to market themselves as being to today ’s Tory party what Blair and Brown were to Labour in Opposition. But Mr Blair and Mr Brown thought things through, in depth and in detail, reviewing every aspect of party and policy from first principles, adapting to a changed world. I see little sign of that in Mr Cameron’s speeches so far.

So we are left where we started before Mr Clarke entered the race, with Mr Davis the likely winner. I have a clear idea how Labour should tackle him, rooted in my firm belief that he is politically and emotionally incapable of taking the Tories to the centre ground.

None of the candidates has yet to articulate any sense of how he would mould and lead a genuinely changed Conservative Party. Every time the candidates attack Blair and Brown, the staple of nearly all their speeches, they confirm Labour’s dominance of the landscape, and expose their inability to do what Tony and Gordon did — take arguments about their own party back to basics and build a coherent long-term strategy to change party and country. It sounds easy. It wasn’t. Not one of the Tories on offer understands the nature of what was required by Labour then, and by them now.

Whoever wins, the next leader is likely to go the same way as Major, Hague, IDS and Howard: defeated by new Labour because he fails to understand it is a real and sustained political project.

The author was director of communications and strategy at 10 Downing Street, 2001-03

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