The Conservative fightback is now starting in earnest

‘Labour is going to hand power back to the unions’

- Stephen Pollard

YOU'D be forgiven for not having noticed, but the past few weeks have seen six candidates for the Tory leadership try to win support from their fellow MPs and party members.

Tomorrow, the contest begins in earnest with the first vote, taking the candidacy down to five. But the truth about politics is that when you're up against a Government with a comfortable majority, no one really cares about the opposition.

That's especially true at the moment. The Tories didn't just lose the last election. They lost pretty much all the reputation they had for sound governance - and for the qualities that once made the Conservatives the single most ruthlessly efficient election-winning party in the democratic world.

But while political reality means the Tories will almost certainly remain irrelevant for the next two or three years, it absolutely does not mean that the leadership contest is itself irrelevant. Far from it.