Democracy, wrote George Bernard Shaw, substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few. It may be a crude caricature of the forthcoming Conservative leadership election, but it contains at least the grain of truth that a caricature requires. Despite Michael Howard’s best intentions in attempting to reform the leadership rules, an impression is being created of a stitch-up by an unelected and largely unknown cabal, operating behind closed doors in order to negate the influence of a party membership that mistakenly voted for Iain Duncan Smith nearly four years ago.

This is all wrong. The party members who elected Mr Duncan Smith and the Conservative Board which yesterday proposed a complicated system of election by ping pong have been found wanting, and the party’s MPs have been kept in the dark. Decisions which they are assured will be in their best interests are being taken in the shadows. Conservative Party members, who have fought the fight on the ground for decades, now find themselves under assault from a governing body which is seeking to remove from them the power not only directly to elect a leader but to choose their local candidate as well.

These two issues should be uncoupled. It is irrational to present party members with one catch-all motion this autumn, updating both the leadership and the local selection rules. The rules for electing a party leader are a separate issue which should be presented on its own.

Those in the Conservative hierarchy who view this reform as the Tory version of Labour’s “Clause Four” moment fail to understand that Tony Blair’s Clause Four campaign succeeded not by gerrymandering the result but by winning a long argument with often antagonistic and vehemently opposed Labour Party members in a series of often angry meetings around the country.

Any new system for the Conservative leadership must be simple enough to understand. It should avoid the ping pong being proposed at present, whereby the wishes of party members can be overruled by MPs. It should, as befits a great democratic party in a great democracy, give clarity and a voice to all party members. The Conservative Party could do a lot worse than follow new Labour in this respect, and institute an electoral college whereby MPs have 50 per cent of the votes, and the party membership the remaining 50 per cent. Wholly undesirable candidates could be ruled out by the imposition of a further rule that any candidate must have the support of a fifth — or, as currently proposed, a tenth — of MPs to stand in the first place.

And then there is the real battle, one that is implicit in the current contest — the fight for the heart, soul and direction of the party. Victory here lies not in satisfying the competing demands of Member of Parliament and member of the party, but in meeting the needs and aspirations of those who, in the past three elections, didn’t vote Conservative.