MORE than half the members of the Conservative Party have yet to cast their vote for a new leader as the contest enters the final fortnight.

The Times has learnt that only 44 per cent of the 260,000 eligible voters have sent back their ballot papers. In the last leadership contest more than half returned their ballot paper as soon as they received it.

Turnout is also expected to be higher than the 79 per cent who voted in the 2001 contest, which took place in the quieter months of August and September. The result will be announced on December 6.

The decision by so many members to take their time suggests that they wanted to see how David Davis and David Cameron fared in the television debates, in which they pitted their wits against each other, a studio audience and interviewers including Jeremy Paxman.

The last big television hustings took place yesterday and produced the sharpest exchanges yet, with the pair clashing over tax, drugs, drinking and how much support should be given to Tony Blair.

Mr Davis threatened a Shadow Cabinet insurrection if Mr Cameron won and then tried to “prop up” the Prime Minister by supporting his education plans. Mr Cameron, the front-runner, said that it would not be fair to play games with plans that could improve the education of thousands, even if he believed that those plans did not go far enough.

“The alternatives are — back them and say ‘Let’s improve it further’, or go through the division lobbies with Frank Dobson and Jeremy Corbyn and people who, frankly, if you put them in the Natural History Museum the dinosaurs would walk out in objection,” he told the Jonathan Dimbleby programme on ITV1. “I don’t want to see the Conservative Party do that. It is too opportunistic.”

He accused Mr Davis of offering the same “core vote” strategy that had lost the party the last two elections; but Mr Davis replied that Mr Blair’s “used-car salesman” routine, in which policies failed to live up to their billing, had fooled the Tories in the past. “We don’t want to be an accomplice in that confidence trick on the public,” he said. Even if he lost the leadership contest, he would push for £38 billion of tax cuts, he said. That was a warning to Mr Cameron not to let down the party’s Right.

Mr Davis, 56, also accused Mr Cameron, 39, of U-turns on education, health and immigration. Mr Cameron wrote the 2005 election manifesto but has since said that the party made big mistakes.

After a previous televised clash Mr Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, was universally declared the winner. This encounter was less easy to call, and both camps claimed a win.

Supporters of Mr Cameron said that his assured performance had made Mr Davis look confrontational. Mr Davis’s supporters said that Mr Cameron appeared to be an old- fashioned “wet”, well to the left of the party’s centre of gravity and thus a threat to unity.

Mr Davis received a boost yesterday when Ann Widdecombe, the former Home Office Minister and darling of the Tory grass roots, said that she did not dismiss Mr Cameron but worried about his lack of experience. “I think we really do have to go for the experience option,” she said.

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