MICHAEL HOWARD and his backbench critics should think again. The Tories’ current plight borders on the ludicrous. MPs are getting heated about changes that largely restore power to them, while Mr Howard is being pilloried for announcing that he wants to resign as leader, and then not going quickly enough.

The only beneficiary is the Government. It is not just that Tory MPs are absorbed in their own plots and machinations: more important is that the necessary debate about why the Tories lost again and what they need to do to win has not really begun. Most of the speeches in the Queen’s Speech debate by Tory frontbench spokesmen were merely rehashes of familiar election positions.

There are two problems. First, changes in the leadership election rules have been bundled together with alterations to disciplinary procedures affecting candidates and MPs and a revision of the party’s constitition. These are all separate matters, and the party board agreed yesterday to decouple the vote on the leadership rules from the other issues. Mr Howard conceded in his letter to Tory MPs that the launch of the reform package could have been better handled.

Secondly, there is timing. The various constitutional changes will not be approved until late September and the leadership contest will not occur until after the Tory conference in October. So a new leader is unlikely to be in place for another five months. That timetable is unaffected by yesterday’s announcement. Indeed, Mr Howard defended this timing as being “in the best interests of our party. I do not, therefore, intend to resign the leadership at an earlier date.”

The flaw has been that Mr Howard’s timetable will turn the autumn party conference into one long hustings meeting. Party activists will not have the final say over the leadership under the new rules, but they will have a key early influence.

A wide range of Tory MPs wants the autumn conference to mark the launch of the new leader, rather than of the contest. Otherwise, the period of limbo will continue into the autumn. There is less than seven weeks between the return of MPs from the half-term recess on June 6 and the start of the summer recess on July 21. It would be hard to cram in all the necessary consultations, revisions and a meeting of the Constitutional College, let alone the election of the leader, although Tory MPs could return to Westminster during the recess in September.

However, talk among some of the angrier MPs about a leadership challenge to Mr Howard is fatuous. He does not deserve to be ousted in this way. But he must consider truncating the timetable so that the new constitution is agreed in early September, with a new leader in place by the end of the month. At present, Tony Blair and his team are getting a free ride.

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