DAVID CAMERON and David Davis will take the fight for the Conservative leadership to the party’s membership today after surviving the MPs’ ballot and forcing Liam Fox out of the race.

Mr Cameron enters the nationwide run-off as the overwhelming favourite, having secured the backing of 90 MPs, with Mr Davis on 57 and Dr Fox on 51.

Within an hour of the result being announced Mr Cameron surprisingly reopened the controversy surrounding his past by answering a question on the use of drugs. Under pressure on Channel 4 News Mr Cameron said he had never taken Class A drugs as an MP. He has previously refused to discuss the matter, saying that was a private issue.

By answering the question Mr Cameron has opened the door to further interrogation on the issue as the six-week leadership campaign got under way. He seems certain to face questions over whether he took drugs before becoming an MP in 2001.

Mr Cameron fell short of securing a majority of MPs and Mr Davis raced out to the television cameras to announce that he was fighting on. He will emphasise his appeal as the meritocrat candidate, over Mr Cameron, Eton and Oxford, but known to his friends as Dave, by returning to his old university at Warwick today to restart his campaign. He said he intends “to carry to members of the party and others my beliefs: an opportunity society, in hope for Britain, in changing Britain to improve lives, and particularly to address the issue of reaching those parts of Britain that the Conservative Party has not reached for too long”.

A new battle opens today between David, the self-made, SAS-trained grammar school boy, and Dave, the smooth Eton-educated young pretender who leads the Notting Hill set of modernisers. Mr Cameron’s voting tally was not as high as some of his supporters had expected. He picked up 34 votes on Tuesday’s vote, but his campaign team had hoped to nudge the 100 mark after several Davis MPs publicly moved to him and Kenneth Clarke’s 38 votes came up for grabs.

But it was still a decisive victory for the man who, until his party conference speech 16 days ago, had been an outsider in the race. Since then Mr Davis’s fortunes have sunk to such an extent that his very survival gave him and his team a lift. Mr Davis, speaking outside Parliament, said: “There is a long time to go in this contest yet, still another six weeks. I intend to fight for my beliefs.”

Several MPs announced that they were defecting from Mr Davis to Mr Cameron. They included Nadine Dorries, who seconded his nomination.

Both candidates will spend the next six weeks battling it out in the Tory heartlands. Mr Cameron will face demands to flesh out his policy agenda, although friends said last night that he would avoid giving any hostages to fortune. Mr Davis’s hope will be that Mr Cameron fails to live up to the expectations he has generated.

Mr Cameron said he wanted to create a Conservative Party for the 21st century. “I’m looking forward to taking my message right round the country,” he said. “It is going to be a lot of hard work, but I am very excited by it. I want to be a voice for change, for optimism and for hope in this country.”

Mr Cameron is starting his campaign today with a visit to Brent South, a safe Labour seat in which the Conservatives were represented by a modernising candiate at the election; constituency engagements in Oxfordshire; and a Blair-style internet webcast.

It was another extraordinary day at Westminster. Tension between the Davis and Fox camps boiled over into a heated row in the Commons tea room. John Hayes, a chief cheerleader for Dr Fox, accused Derek Conway, his opposite number, of planting a story in the Evening Standard headlined: “Gay smears and me by Tory hopeful”. Dr Fox was described in the story as talking for the first time about rumours that he had a gay past while declining to comment directly on the “ smears”.

Dr Fox said he was disappointed despite having boosted his total by nine votes. “That’s politics,” he said. “We came from behind all the way through and provided everyone with a great run for their money.” He congratulated his two rivals and said he would endorse the candidate who came closest to supporting the agenda he set out in his campaign.

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