David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary and the bookies' favourite for the leadership of the Conservative Party, this morning set out his ideas for leading the party, while at the same time declining to announce that he was a candidate for the job.

At one point asking "what race?" about the developing leadership contest, Mr Davis painted himself as an old-style Tory with a libertarian agenda. He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that he was a "believer in choice" and "a society where choice is a mechanism to improve standards, in strong law and order and liberty".

Mr Davis seemed keen to modify his image as the "hard man" on the right of the Conservative Party saying: "I am not sure what left or right means".

He insisted that the Tories develop policies to win more votes from women and from the middle classes, both of whom voted for the party at historically lower levels at the last election.

Mr Davis also said that: "One of test of our policies should be whether they help the poor or not, after all, they are the people who get the worst crime problems, who have the worst health problems, the worst education problems and they are the people who pay the highest proportion of tax, believe it or not... Now is that left or right?"

In his work as Shadow Home Secretary, Mr Davis said that he had had to fight for trials by jury and the presumption of innocence. He also questioned whether Asbos were an effective measure to tackle the causes of crime.

Continuing arguments he made in an article yesterday for The Observer, Mr Davis said that the Conservative Party should return to a mission of "trying to give people hope and aspiration". He said: "This is not a new tradition for the Tories, it goes back to Shaftesbury, it goes back two centuries almost, and this hard-edged image is rather recent, frankly, for the Tories."

Mr Davis's right wing credentials set him apart from the plethora of leadership candidates from the left of the Tory party. Yesterday Tim Yeo, a potential runner from the more liberal wing of the party, told BBC Radio that the leadership race was becoming crowded with centrist and liberal candidates, and that most should stand aside to allow a straight battle between Mr Davis and a single left-winger.

"It would be helpful if the plethora of would-be leaders around at the moment can coalesce around one person," said Mr Yeo. "I think that will give us a better chance of a good contest in the interests of the party and the country."

Yesterday it was the turn of Liam Fox to set out a blueprint to heal "a broken society" in what was widely being interpreted as his manifesto for the leadership. The Shadow Foreign Secretary also confirmed his engagement to be married to a fellow doctor, Jesme Baird, director of patient care at the Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation in Glasgow.

Dr Fox, 43, said that Britain needed urgently to tackle crime, mental illness and a "dispossessed class of young people in our inner cities" — issues that are far beyond his foreign affairs brief.

Supporters of David Cameron, the 38-year-old Shadow Education Secretary tipped as a possible leader from the younger Tory generation, said that he too seemed certain to stand. Their confidence came after a lengthy article by Mr Cameron in a Sunday newspaper talking of the urgency of "helping the most vulnerable in our society". The article, based on his own struggle to care for his two-year-old son, Ivan, who has epilepsy and cerebral palsy, concluded: "Conservative compassion is based on an understanding that we are all individuals with different needs. It is time for this aspect of Conservatism to come to the fore once again."

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