The three best bets in the Conservative paddock

Those, including this column, who called for the Conservative leadership contest to be taken in stages did so for a reason. The one luxury total defeat has bought the Tories is time.

This was not available in the last great Conservative rethink, which began with Margaret Thatcher’s candidacy for the leadership in February 1975. She won at a point when the Labour government, though still young, held only a tiny majority. All through the ensuing four years, she had to be ready for a snap general election if Labour lost that majority through by-elections or defections.

As a result, her big, long-term philosophical and policy rebuilding of the party was always vulnerable to the sudden necessity of a campaign. Indeed, if Jim Callaghan, the Labour prime minister, had chosen October 1978 as his election date, he might well have won. After the Winter of Discontent of the following January and February, nothing could save him.

Now that the Tories find themselves “We few, we unhappy few”, with almost no chance for the next five years, they do not yet need to obsess about opinion polls. The “How can we win again?” question is vital, but not immediate. They must answer the prior question, “What is wrong with Britain?” The right person to lead them is the one whom they can trust to answer that question with the best remedies.

Today’s second stage in the long process is for MPs only. Their job is to boil the candidates down to the four who can best be presented to the party membership for its inspection – quite a different thought-process from making their final choice. They can do so fairly freely because no candidate is truly well known to the public and or has unmistakable momentum.

So far, nothing decisive has emerged in the campaign. No one has soared like a rocket. No one has crashed and burned.

My own, slightly tentative impressions are that both Mel Stride and James Cleverly have shown they are liked by colleagues, but that is about it. I defy anyone to discern “the vision thing” in either.

This is not so surprising in the competent Mr Stride, because he is the most obscure, but it does seem a bit worrying that Mr Cleverly, who has held two of the great offices of state (the Foreign Office and the Home Office) is such a blank page. Can anyone say, for example, what he really thought about immigration when he oversaw it? If I were a member of a golf club, I would always be pleased to find him at the bar, but voters might want a bit more than that.

The three candidates who surely deserve to go before the members – and whose disagreements in that forum will be instructive – are Kemi Badenoch, Robert Jenrick and Tom Tugendhat.

Here are a few thoughts, favourable and critical, about their showings so far.

Mrs Badenoch leaves the strongest mark. She is vivid and brave. She makes Tories feel that at last someone is ready to take on socialism once more. Most of them enjoy the sensation of this being done by a black African woman: she knows exactly how to make the other side squirm about how to fight back.

The reverse of the same coin is that it is not only political opponents she likes to assail. She is such a pugilist that even Conservatives can feel bruised by her. There are stories of important donors being treated high-handedly, of her arriving late, of occasionally being under-briefed or tetchy or, as a minister, being less interested in her departments’ work than her culture-war skirmishes.

After the years of Boris and the weeks of Liz Truss, some want a leader who is steadier, calmer and more strategic.

Mr Jenrick is the one who has made up the most ground in the campaign so far. Since his resignation as immigration minister last year, he has transformed himself from a seemingly rather identikit middle-ranking minister into a thoughtful and tough-minded campaigner who speaks up for those bits of England (he sits for a Nottinghamshire seat) most neglected by the modern ruling classes. He is probably the closest to the party’s grass-roots.

That might make him too narrow for the task, though. He might well steady Reform defectors, but at a high price for the “One Nation” ideal – not in its debased meaning of pink Tories who love high spending and taxes, but in its real vision of national unity across the classes. Despite determinedly slimming, he has not fully escaped the “Tory boy” caricature.

Mr Tugendhat is the one with the most unblemished record. In his admittedly brief ministerial career, he well articulated his security portfolio, setting it in its global context. He understands how our Western economy and way of life are threatened more than at any time since the 1940s. This can be said of very few current politicians. Our freedom is at risk. I think he was the only candidate to emphasise the word “freedom” in his campaign launch speech. He is also the strongest on the Union, the others tending to think England equals Britain.

Against that, is the feeling among some that he has not built up a strong enough parliamentary base and is a bit to the Left at a time when momentum is with the Right.

It is too early to weigh up any of these questions finally, but I do think it is clear who deserve to make the next cut.