The Thatcherite - Priti Patel: Cameron A-lister is a staunch rightwinger and proud of it

The 36-year-old who looks set to become Britain’s first Asian woman MP displays a photograph of herself with Margaret Thatcher on her website.

A member of David Cameron’s A-list, Priti Patel is standing in the new and seemingly safe Tory seat of Witham in Essex.

“I’m a right-wing Tory and proud to be a right-wing Tory,” she said after her selection in November 2006. Four years earlier, she told a newspaper that Thatcher was “the most significant person” to her generation.

Ms Patel, a staunch Eurosceptic, spent the 1997 general election campaign working as a spin doctor for James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party, having temporarily defected from the Conservatives. After returning, she became deputy press secretary for William Hague when he was Leader of the Opposition, before making her first attempt to enter Parliament, contesting Nottingham North in 2005.

Ms Patel, a director for Weber Shandwick, the public relations company, wants “a future where Britain is governed by the British for the British”. She is in favour of a referendum, not just on the Lisbon treaty but on “Britain’s relationship with Europe”.

A Union Jack forms the backdrop to her picture on the website, which says: “She supports a tough stance on immigration and believes that 12 years of a Labour Government has resulted in uncontrolled immigration.”

Her views on crime are similarly traditionalist. She is in favour of capital punishment and has claimed that the law has for too long “been on the side of the criminal”.

Ms Patel was born in London and went to secondary school in Watford. Her parents, who came to Britain as refugees from Uganda in the 1970s, ran a number of small businesses and she describes the traditions of “self-help, the importance of family life and support of the local community” as central to her upbringing.

Ms Patel’s website also claims that she “strongly believes in putting local people before party politics” and she has not been afraid of speaking her mind in the past, even when it has made uncomfortable reading for the party leadership. Shortly after her selection for Witham, she told the The Mail on Sunday: “We are in danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water. David Cameron is not doing enough to carry party members with him in terms of his style and approach.”

The Old Etonian - Zac Goldsmith: Environmental guru could prove to be a thorn in the side

Poker-loving, roll-up smoking, green guru Frank Zacharias “Zac” Goldsmith seemed every bit the dream Cameroon in the heady weeks after David Cameron’s leadership election.

When the long-time editor of The Ecologist, 34, was charged with giving the party’s environmental push some credibility, he had it all going for him. The rugged looks. And Mikhail Gorbachev’s Global Green Award in 2004. What more could a party need?

The Old Etonian also quickly made the priority list of candidates and in March 2007 he was chosen to fight the target seat of Richmond Park. A future in a Tory Government seemed assured.

But the reality for the dapper, dashing son of Sir James Goldsmith, charismatic businessmen whose single-issue Referendum Party flopped in 1997, has not been so smooth.

Zac Goldsmith’s group’s Quality of Life report on environmental issues was greeted with a shudder by activists and leadership alike. George Osborne said he would be “off my trolley” to endorse one of the more talked- about ideas, a tax on out-of-town supermarket car parks. But this row served only to distract attention from some of the greater horrors buried in the report. In the introduction, it suggested that “ever increasing material gain can become not a gift but a burden”.

At the time critics said that this suggestion was an easy thing for a multimillionaire to assert. Today, as Britain is in its worst financial situation since the Second World War, few statements look less appropriate. Nor has his candidacy in Richmond, against the redoubtable Susan Kramer, been smooth.

Awkward questions have been asked about his marriage. Mr Goldsmith, who married in 1999, refuses to discuss his relationship with Alice Rothschild, 26, sister of his younger brother’s wife. Goldsmith says that he has made an absolute principle of never involving his family in his political career.

But if he gets in, will he be a thorn in the side of a Tory government? The answer is ambiguous.

“You don’t join it with a view to undermining it or causing it problems,” he said in an interview with The Times this year.

But at the same time, in a statement unlikely to impress Tory whips: “You don’t sign up for every detail, you sign up for the basic underlying principles.”

All will depend on how much he wants a place in government.

The Young Fogey - Jacob Rees-Mogg: Torch-carrier for the Old Etonians

Jacob Rees Mogg, the candidate for North East Somerset, is an unabashed torch carrier for the Old Etonian strand of Conservatism. Mr Rees Mogg, 39, who favours double-breasted suits and is the youngest son of William Rees-Mogg, former Editor of The Times, did little to endear himself to Mr Cameron when in 2006 he criticised the leader’s efforts to make the party more representative.

“We don’t want to make it harder for intellectually able people to be Tory party candidates.” he said. He beat two Alist candidates for selection in Labour-held North East Somerset, where boundary changes have reduced Labour to a thin majority.

The Compassionate Tory - Philippa Stroud: Fought poverty in Hong Kong

Philippa Stroud, as executive director of the Centre for Social Justice, the think-tank set up by Iain Duncan Smith, has spent years working on his compassionate conservatism agenda. The mother of three and staunch Eurosceptic is standing in Sutton and Cheam. Married to a pastor, Mrs Stroud, 43, says that her life is framed by her Christianity and cites Martin Luther King, William Wilberforce and her parents as key influences. Her website says that she has spent 17 years building organisations that fight poverty and has worked with drug addicts and gang members in Hong Kong.

The Maverick - Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones: Unlikely to heed the party whip

Jamaican-born businessman Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones, who sells a food range under the brand The Black Farmer, will be a self-confessed maverick on the Conservative benches if he wins the new seat of Chippenham.

Having been dismissed from the Army after a year because of a “lack of discipline”, the 52-year-old father of three seems unlikely always to obey the party whip.

Mr Emmanuel-Jones was one of nine children who grew up in a deprived part of inner-city Birmingham. He became a producer on BBC cookery programmes before starting his successful food marketing business.

The Cameroon - Nicholas Boles: Reformer shows taste for power

Nick Boles is one of the few among the new intake that a Cameron government could trust absolutely. Indeed, he probably championed the notion of modernising Tories before David Cameron. A former flatmate of Michael Gove, Mr Boles’s key role was founding director of Policy Exchange, the think-tank that nurtured progressive Conservatism through the dark days of Iain Duncan Smith. Mr Boles is already more powerful than most Shadow ministers as the leading member of the implementation team under Francis Maude. He has also had a taste of power, having spent a brief time as interim chief of staff to Boris Johnson in May.

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