Alan Watkins: Labour's own quirky system could leave Brown in the cold

Forty-two years ago, by contrast, the week's events came as a most tremendous shock to the system. On the first day Harold Macmillan, from his sickbed, announced his retirement through the mouth of Lord Home on the platform. There is now a myth about this; or, rather, there are two myths.

One is that the old conjurer was given a faulty prognosis and thought he was shortly going to die of prostate cancer. The son of the surgeon who had performed the original operation, himself a urinary specialist likewise, Mr David Badenoch, has disputed this version of events. Macmillan was given an accurate prediction but seized on his illness as an "act of God" which enabled him to leave No 10. In fact he was only 69 (Mr Kenneth Clarke's age at the next election) and Macmillan went on to die at 92.

The other myth is that the government was "brought down" by the Profumo affair earlier in 1963. While Macmillan may have found himself more inclined to resign because of the summer scandal, his government carried on merrily under Sir Alec Douglas-Home, as Lord Home had become, and almost won the 1964 election. In my opinion, the Conservatives would have won outright if they had possessed the sense to choose the favourite, R A Butler, instead.

This illustrates what now seems to be an established law about Conservative contests for leader. The favourite never wins. Indeed, if we leave aside John Major's bizarre re-election in 1995, the last favourite to win was Anthony Eden 40 years before. That was a one-horse race too, where the political project was to ease Winston Churchill out and to manoeuvre Eden in (though it is also fair to say that Butler thought his best chance of succeeding had occurred in 1953, when Churchill had become ill).

The propensity of the Tories to upset settled expectations seems to exist independently of the system they currently favour to select their leader. Before 1965, they relied on what were called the customary processes of consultation. Between 1965 and 1998, election was by MPs, as it had been in the Labour Party until Labour's perfectly good system was changed crazily in 1981. The Tories took a further 16 or 17 years to go completely mad. The impetus was provided in a speech at the 1997 conference by Lord Archer, who demanded 50 per cent of the vote by the constituencies.

Mr William Hague, the last leader to be elected by the MPs alone, worked out a system whereby two candidates would be chosen by the MPs and would then be voted on by the members generally. Quite why Mr Hague made this lunatic change has yet to be explained satisfactorily. It was suggested at the time that it was to safeguard his own position, but it was difficult to see how it achieved that object in practice. In 2001, post-election, he departed in a masquerade of conscience, like Mr Major before him and Mr Michael Howard after him.

In all these vicissitudes, the party has shown a sturdy urge to upset the bookies. In 1957, the favourite was Butler, as he was likewise in 1963. In 1965, it was Reginald Maudling; in 1975, William Whitelaw. In 1990, either Douglas Hurd or Michael Heseltine was initially thought of as the winner. In 1997, with Heseltine ill and Michael Portillo having lost his seat, the favourite was Clarke. In 2001, Clarke and Portillo were joint favourites but Portillo came third of the MPs' poll by one vote. Clarke was top but Iain Duncan Smith, the second choice in the House, came first in the country.

Mr Howard tried to revert to the system that had been established in 1965. He won a narrow majority but not by the requisite two-thirds margin. Perhaps he should not have expected to win, for it is hard to bestow power on people and then take it away from them. What was very clear from last week's events was that the Tories in the constituencies wanted to choose among Mr Cameron, Mr Clarke, Mr David Davis and Dr Liam Fox. But the rules of the game do not allow them to do this. Goodness knows what unlikely duo the MPs will produce!

I read last week that the MPs were the most sophisticated electorate in the world - or, at any rate, that this was the high opinion which they held of themselves. The phrase was originally and properly applied to the Parliamentary Labour Party, many of whose members had been brought up on local councils and in trade unions, where they had absorbed various dark arts. The background of most Tory members was quite different, as it is now.

For one thing, they did not have the maths. Their Labour equivalents might not be able to solve differential equations either: but they could at least work out in their heads how many doubles and trebles were needed to produce a given score at darts. Not so the Tories. In 1990, when Margaret Thatcher was felled, they - not least her initial campaign manager, the late Peter Morrison - had the greatest difficulty in comprehending the "surcharge" which, as things turned out, was to cost her victory in the first ballot and to lead to her demise.

Now we hear of various devices being canvassed to keep Mr Clarke, in particular, out of the final two. It has been suggested that Sir Michael Spicer, the intelligent chairman of the 1922 Committee, has the discretion to include three rather than two candidates for submission to the wider electorate - and that this procedure could and should have been followed with Mr Portillo's inclusion in 2001. Well, Tory rules always say somewhere that the chairman of the 1922's decision is final. But on this occasion, there is no sign that Sir Michael intends to interpret the rules with any flexibility.

In the past few months there has been an understandable tendency to make mock of the Tories' embarrassments. But the Labour Party could easily find itself in similar difficulties. In successive leadership contests, in 1983, 1992 and 1994, all three sections of the so-called electoral college found themselves at one. Everyone assumes that Mr Gordon Brown - the latest Tory conference villain - will win with a similar unanimity. And yet... the Labour system may not be quite as crazed as the Tories', but it is none the less an unstable structure.