Rifkind and Clarke are yesterday’s men, and Clarke has issues over Europe and lifestyle to boot.
Davis blew his speech; Fox is too far to the right; Cameron is a bit on the young side.
Davis and Cameron are alpha males, Fox has yet to show such quality.
Cameron has the advantage over Davis that if - more like when - the Conservatives lose next time around but only just, he’ll be young enough to carry on.
Davis has the support of a lot of MPs; Cameron’s support amongst his colleagues is less well known.
So it’s a toss-up between Davis and Cameron.
If I had a vote (I’m not a member of the Conservative Party), I’d vote for Maggie.
I also think that Howard made a major mistake by announcing his intention to resign immediately after the election. He actually did very well, and the current crop of candidates need testing. This is an election that should be happenning next year.
There was talk of restricting the vote for Tory leader to MPs, who at least have some sort of clue about what manner of person is electable as Prime Minister. But the leadership voting system includes the views of public Tory Party members, and they delightfully elect odious shits in their own image who are fairly repellent to the general public, hence their recent run of poor electoral results despite Tony Blair’s drop in support after Iraq. It didn’t help that the Tories had Nosferatu as their choice of leader.
There was an opportunity to reform the Tory voting system to block out the public party faithful, but it was missed. IIRC, the MPs choose the leadership candidates, and then the whole party (public too) gets to vote.
I hope they choose David Davies. He’s a nasty bigoted little slimeball, and will do a fine job of flushing the last remaining turds of the Conservative Party right round the S-bend.
Cameron strikes me as the archetypal weak-chinned public school boy who would get ripped to shreds by the media if he were thrust into the public eye. Still, he is young and the prospect of an arlarse like Ken Clarke or Malcolm Rifkind taking the reins just seems depressing. I don’t know about anyone else, but I am well past the stage of laughing at the tories, the UK (and the labour party) would benefit from an effective opposition.
It isn’t that we don’t care at all, it’s more that one has to be proactive to find out anything about it. The US mass media have virtually nothing to say on the subject.
Well I’m very interested in these elections and I think … Naanh … can’t fake it - I got nuthin’. Are these the guys that yell at Blair in that Chamber thing every week on PBS right after Dr. Who?
You could help us a little. Is Blair’s following GW into this Iraq mess enough to bring down the Labor majority Parliament and put in Conservatives? I get the impression that it isn’t so it really doesn’t matter much what the Conservatives do in their private election.
No. We had an election in the UK after Blair’s ill-advised and deeply unpopular Iraq adventuring, but even that wasn’t enough to make the Tories more popular. Labour’s majority was significantly reduced though.
There’s a certain uncharitable but nonetheless pleasing glowing feeling to be had from watching the disintegration of the Conservative party. They’re political dinosaurs whose only real support comes from rural consituencies in England, and their philosophy and policies have been appropriated by Labour in Blair’s shift to the right over the last 10 years.
Of course there’s always the Liberal Democrats; generally well-meaning people who don’t ever get to form governments or policy.
I’d quite like to see the Lib Dems as the 2nd UK political party, and proportional representation introduced so we get a hung Labour/Lib Dem parliament which would be forced into a coalition. The Greens would make a fine 3rd party, and the Conservatives can take their rightful place amidst the likes of the smaller parties like the Scottish Nationalists and Plaid Cymru.
And those of us who do follow UK politics are perfectly aware that, at the moment, despite the erosion of public confidence in Labour, the Conservative Party is pretty much irrelevant; so why pay attention to its internal elections? Even following the LibDems would yield more of interest and value.
If that happened, it would be a nightmare. Without fail the Liberal Democrats oppose any proposal made by the other two parties. I think their only policy is to oppose everything that is put forward.
Seriously, I don’t pay too much attention to what similarly-minded countries do internally; and I figure that the U. K. and the U.S.A. have much more in common than not to be too concerned about their party politics.
I’m much more bound to paying attention (granted, via American media news agencies) to the internal shennanigans of countries with a signifigant “KILL ALL AMERICANS!” ethos amongst a fairly representative proportion of their electorate (those that even have electorates, that is).
I honestly don’t think too many average-Joe AmCits care enough about U.K. politics to pay that much attention to them. It may be arrogance on out part, but I really think that it’s more a matter of enough going on in our own country to not care to much about the internal politics of a friendly foreign power.
Now, if the “KILL ALL AMERICANS” party came to power in the U.K., I think :rolleyes: that might change.
20% of those polled said they would be more likely to vote Tory if he were the leader, and only 8% less likely. Clarke is considerably more popular amongst the UK electorate at large than any other Tory candidate.
I truly hate being asked for a cite of something that knows anything about the topic should know.
