Bruce Anderson: You need more than a sense of duty to lead the Tory party

'Michael Ancram is a good man, with a delightful wife and family. He enjoys gossip, eating and drinking, fishing, shooting and playing the guitar. A life-enhancing fellow, always excellent company, he rarely appears in public without a chuckle.

Yet there is a serious side. Lord Ancram did not go into politics out of ideological conviction, and still less because he sought money or self-aggrandisement. It is hard to aggrandise the heir to a marquessate. In the latter years of the Major government, he was a promising middle-ranking minister at the Northern Ireland Office, with a sound claim to rise higher. There was no obvious reason why Douglas Hogg or George Young should have been elevated to the cabinet ahead of Michael Ancram, except that his duties forbade it. In Ulster, he had made himself indispensable; he could not have been spared for promotion. But he would never have dreamt of complaining.

In his most recent post, as Tory party chairman, he felt that he should not impose additional burdens on over-stretched finances. So he paid for a lot of his own office costs. Admittedly, he was in a position to do so, but accounts of the Lothian family's acreage greatly overstate Lord Ancram's wealth. As he has no son, most of those acres will go straight to his younger brother's family. Michael Ancram is no plutocrat.

He also gave up an opportunity for enrichment; before he became a politician, he had a promising career at the Bar. This is a chap who entered public life for that most old-fashioned of reasons: to serve the public. Britain would be better if there were a lot more Michael Ancrams in the House of Commons.

Not, however, in a leadership role; this is Willie Whitelaw, not Margaret Thatcher. When he announced his leadership bid he called on his party to stand by its principles while repudiating spin and "stardust". In effect, he made a passionate plea for small "c" conservatism and for his party to consolidate itself on known ground. This is not enough.

The Tory party cannot return to office by consolidating itself around 32 per cent of the voters. It is true that millions of small "c" conservatives failed to vote Conservative in June, but recalling them to their proper allegiance will require inspiration, not consolidation.

The new Tory leader will face two principal tasks, neither remotely consolidatory. The first is to restore party morale by carrying the war into the enemy camp: by defying Mr Blair's majority and deriding his failures. The second is to win the battle of ideas: to restore to his fellow Tories that intellectual zest, that sense of being an idée en marche, which the Tories had in the late Seventies, retained well into the Eighties, but then lost, to their cost.

War, ideas: these are not Lord Ancram's strengths. He is shrewd and cunning. He possesses that uncommon quality, common sense. "Just walk me round the paddock a couple of times, Michael, and hose me down," Paddy Mayhew once asked him after an especially fraught negotiating session in Ulster. Michael Ancram is good at all that. A schmoozer, a calmer down, he knows how to ease away tension with a joke and a glass of whisky, plus the exercise of his enormous charm. He is an invaluable adjutant – and no leader. He possesses all the qualities which would enable him to assist the leadership, but he does not possess leadership.

Michael Portillo probably does. He held his official launch on the same day as Michael Ancram did, though in grander surroundings. The Avenue Bar in St James's serves a fine Buck's Fizz, but does not understand bacon rolls. When Nicholas Soames was presented with the Avenue's version, he blanched. They were niminy-piminy little objects – no doubt produced by Vermini, Bulimiani or one of the other great Italian frock-houses – but the person who made them had never eaten a bacon sandwich. They were unworthy of Mr Soames's mighty jaws.

They also identify the problem with the Portillo campaign, thus far. It is slick. It is well-funded. It has momentum. But it seems brittle and contentless. Where is the political equivalent of a bacon sandwich stuffed with bacon which tastes of pig and drips with butter?

Mr Portillo's speech went on too long, and contained not a single memorable phrase. Quite rightly, he does not want to make policy on the hoofand in the course of a leadership campaign, thus committing himself to statements which could come back to embarrass him. But there is a middle ground between prematurity and banality. On Thursday morning, Mr Portillo merely repeated his last party conference speech, in a lobotomised version.

At that conference, he had wished to identify himself as touchy-feely and inclusive. He succeeded in doing so, at the cost of failing to make any significant attack on the Government's economic policy: a more conventional task for a shadow chancellor at a party conference.

In that speech, Mr Portillo was compelling. His willingness to admit past mistakes, to strive for a new rhetoric, to forge a new language – to work towards an entirely novel method of presenting the Conservative party to a sceptical electorate: that might come to be seen as one of the more significant party conference speeches of the past few decades.

But there was no need to rehash it to an audience of journalists and politicians over cooling bacon rolls in St James's several months later. We all know that Mr Portillo has been on a journey; he has told us so many times. But the point of going on a journey is to get somewhere. If Mr Portillo feels himself ready to run for the leadership of his party, he must also feel ready to reveal to that party some of the conclusions which he has arrived at during the journeyings.

He can be forgiven for caution. This leadership campaign is set to run until September, so it would be a foolish candidate who runs out of new themes before the end of June. But up to now, Michael Portillo has said nothing.

He is the obvious winner, for he is the only big beast of the jungle in the Tory party, except for Ken Clarke, who seems happier these days selling tobacco in the Vietnamese jungle. But Michael Portillo cannot rely on winning by default.

At present, he has many adherents who are impressed by his past qualities, and by the impression of his potential which they formed some years ago, when it seemed that he was an obvious future leader. But he cannot go trading on past glories, especially in fashionable premises in SW1.

Sooner rather than later, Michael Portillo will have to take himself to the country, if he wants to maintain his momentum. He ought to spend July in the marginal constituencies which the Tories failed to win – and, indeed, in the Labour heartlands. Even if he cannot offer a fully formed policy – which would be folly – he should try to persuade the provinces that he can offer a new, gritty and combative Toryism, and that the Tory fight-back has already begun.

It seems almost inevitable that Mr Portillo will win the Tory leadership, but he still faces one problem. If over the next few weeks he conveys an impression of complacency and arrogance, making it clear that he believes that he should inherit the leadership as an inevitability and an entitlement – he could still lose.