THE five Romney brothers are so handsome and wholesome that they bring to mind the Osmonds, the toothy 1970s pop group and fellow Mormon family. For Mitt Romney, they are a vital campaign prop as he seeks the family values vote for president.

The 2008 Republican nomination is wide open now that Senator John McCain’s bid is collapsing and Fred Thompson, the actor and former senator, is dithering about when to enter the race. A National Journal poll of Washington insiders last week tied Romney with Rudolph Giuliani as the candidates most likely to emerge on top.

Tagg Romney, 37, eldest of the band of brothers, believes his father, who made a fortune in finance before turning around the crisis-ridden Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, is well placed to win. “He has a great shot because he’s from outside Washington, he spent most of his career in business or at the Olympics, and he’s optimistic, charismatic and intelligent,” Tagg said in an interview.

He laughed off the comparison to the Osmonds. “We have a lot of fun together but none of us are good singers. We don’t do a lot of sitting around playing Kumbaya,” he said.

Behind the banter, however, he believes the brothers are important “character witnesses” for their father. “People appreciate getting to know his family and seeing that we’re genuine human beings,” he said.

Romney spent the first six months of the 2008 campaign trying to persuade voters there was more to him than Mormonism and big hair. The effort is paying off. The former governor of Massachusetts enjoys an 8% lead over his rivals in Iowa and a 9% lead in New Hampshire, two crucial early voting states, though he continues to lag in national polls.

He has also raised an impressive $35m (£17m) for his campaign, though he has been spending it on television commercials at an equally phenomenal rate.

The five brothers - the youngest, Craig, is 26 - are spending the summer on the road for their dad, separately touring key primary states in the “Mitt Mobile” van and recruiting donors and campaign workers.

They have launched a light-hearted blog, http://fivebrothers. mittromney.com, where they recount their practical jokes on their parents as well as their campaigning efforts.

Their mother Ann Romney also spent last week without Mitt on her first solo bus tour as “CFO” (chief family officer) in South Carolina, accompanied by Craig’s wife Mary and baby grandson Parker. She recently released a radio advertisement cooing that she and Mitt “met at a high school party and have been going steady ever since”.

If it is all too sugary, she has also spoken movingly of her struggle with multiple sclerosis, which she calls her “bag of rocks”, and the challenge of raising five overactive boys.

In a rare jab at her husband’s rivals, Ann Romney once quipped that Mormon Mitt was the only one of them with one wife. Romney’s clean-living family is his trump card in a field where no candidate appeals fully to the social conservative wing of the Republican party.

Thompson is exciting a lot of interest among conservative evangelical Christians but he recently shot himself in the foot with some faulty recollections about whether he worked as a lobbyist for a pro-abortion group (he did, it finally emerged last week). By delaying his official entry into the race, he is also raising doubts about his energy levels and commitment.

But Romney has run into his own problems with social conservatives, some of whom regard the Mormon religion as a cult. He has been tagged as a flipflop-per for switching his position on abortion from pro-choice, when he was running for governor of left-wing Massachusetts, to pro-life and antistem cell research today. And he has been criticised for allowing Marriott hotels to show pay-per-view porn films to guests when he was on the chain’s board of directors.

He attacked Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential candidate, for advocating age-appropriate sex education for kindergarten children last week, only for it to emerge that his own state of Massachusetts already taught it.

Perhaps his biggest obstacle, though, is one Romney cannot help - he is often regarded as too handsome to be president. It is a fault his perfect line-up of boys will be unable to change.

Guiliani courts Thatcher

Rudolph Giuliani, the Republican frontrunner, will seek Baroness Thatcher’s blessing when he delivers the inaugural Thatcher lecture organised by Atlantic Bridge, a think tank, in London in September.

Thatcher is regarded as the closest living representative of former president Ronald Reagan and her benediction is eagerly pursued by Republican candidates.

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