Tragic inevitability of the Conservative leadership comedy

Before I take a short sabbatical from this column, a round-up on the Tory leadership: Michael Heseltine has added his voice to the general call for poor Mr Thing to step down. He's proposing a dream team of Ken Clarke as leader and Michael Portillo as deputy. This combination, it is suggested, would command such support that all would bow like stooks of wheat before it, and a damagingly divisive election would be avoided.

We loyal viewers of the Conservative comedy point out that a damagingly divisive election is not just inevitable but is almost the only reason for being interested in the Tory party at the moment. There is simply no mechanism in the Tory constitution to allow leadership by acclamation.

Leaders have to be elected – first by the MPs and then by the membership. If Mr Clarke won the professional vote (as he would overwhelmingly) he would lose just as overwhelmingly in the country. Others would run against him, for no one has found a convincing answer to the fundamental question of party politics – Why Not Me? David Davis would run, though why his wife would let him is a mystery.

Theresa May would run, even if she had to do so in high heels. Oliver Letwin might even join them – the evidence we have is that he has repeatedly said he won't. And at this stage it is almost certain that even young Oliver (elected 1997) would beat Mr Clarke.

Last time round, the seasoned, popular Tory heavyweight was beaten two-to-one by someone who was not only utterly unknown but who never had a chance of becoming well known. The party crushingly voted for a fellow who, having achieved invisibility, aspired to inaudibility. And, word has it, they are pleased enough with what they've got.

But others have discerned a change of mood in the party. The failure of the current leadership to attract support has been the single most shocking experience of their political lives. The Government is stumbling, public finances are deteriorating with terrifying speed, the stock market has crashed, recession looms, public services refuse to be reformed, pensions have imploded, we all expect to be poorer rather than richer in the year ahead – and yet the Tories still bump along on at 30 per cent or less, 10 points behind the Government. This New Realism theory suggests that eventually, Tories will sacrifice principles for power, swallow their dislike of Mr Clarke's Europhilia and vote for him as the one man who can provide a comforting shoulder for the electorate to cry on.

There may come a time when this is true. Mr Clarke will run. He gave us to understand that at the party conference. But it is clear he can run only after a euro referendum. Otherwise, his leadership would tear the party apart, especially in a year dominated by European questions (there's the EU constitution coming up in 2003).

No, the Tories will have to sink in the May elections, welcome a June decision for a referendum, and lose the vote in November. Only when the referendum has come and gone, only when the few Tories still standing can look out over the rubble at the bewildered survivors, only when the party realises that an unpopular government might increase its majority, it is only then that Mr Clarke comes into his inheritance.

The party members have to be so depressed that The Daily Telegraph can't make them more depressed about his candidacy. We can only guess how deep that depression has to be. But there on the quarterdeck of the Tory press, Nelson's virtues are paramount; and for the same reason – to defend, even unto death, Britain from the dominion of Brussels. They will not trim, they will not turn. They will point their telescope at another 10 years of Labour rather than endorse a collaborator. No, the only successful leader for the Tory party, in their view, is someone new, someone untainted by the blood feuds of the past decade. For a week is a long time in politics, a year is unimaginable, but a decade is a mere flick of an eye.

None the less, we Eurosceptics for Ken have taken up our position and we hold to it. We sit in the corner making long, keening noises, and will continue to do so until our demands are met.

Please stop frightening the children

I was listening to Leonard Cohen in the car thinking that if only I'd had chronic bronchitis as a young man I too could have been an international melancholic. But then he sang something that shocked me.

It was: "The homicidal bitching that goes on in every kitchen, to determine who will serve and who will eat."

Good grief, there are people who accuse me of cynicism (not, obviously, to my face), but this seems to be a terrible thing to say, especially when there might be young people listening. You know, people under 40.

Why do we want to put such negative, nasty ideas into the bloodstream of the world? There's no argument at all about who serves and who eats in kitchens.

He's just saying that to make us feel awful. He's saying that for the same reason we teach children about global warming, I went on to think: we do it to frighten them.

Of course it's enjoyable; we like to frighten little ones (by the way, Mr Wolf, you don't have the time, by any chance?) but I think we ought to try to stop it. I speak as a child victim of fear-mongering adults through the later half of the last century; in those days we were taught that obliteration was imminent, that nuclear war could do nothing other than eliminate mankind. We even knew the time we were all going to die.

There was a Doomsday Clock, you see. It stood at four minutes to midnight and was ticking away, as clocks do. It was clear that very soon we would all get dead so we took to nihilism, psychoactive drugs and unsafe sex.

Geographers in those days, incidentally, weren't concerned about global warming – it was the next ice age that was said to be well overdue. It may have been a carry-over from the nuclear winter. That tipped us into jeering at the police, going to live in India and alternative comedy.

But these days we scare and depress children with another theory about which they can do nothing. Maybe warming is serious, maybe it isn't; the only thing we know for sure is that 12-year-olds won't be able to do anything about it.

In the light of that, would educationists track the rise in youth suicides over the past 50 years before spreading their generalised anxieties any further down the age range?

Is it time to take law into our own hands?

This column has warned the European Commission about the number of regulations it passes. Now I bring you cheer: there is a positive light in which to view them. The historian George Colton pointed out that, more than a century ago, as London's wealth increased in the middle ages, so did its city politics; as political activity increased, so did the number of laws passed. The number of absurd requirements forced on us is a cheering reminder of our national wealth.

In the 14th century, as a Londoner you had a legal obligation to stand bail for your neighbours' good behaviour, whether or not you had any control over them. You weren't allowed out of the city without permission. There was no minimum wage but there was a maximum wage for servants.

Certain tradesmen weren't allowed to withdraw from trade just because they were losing money. You could trade only with certain named people or communities and only in certain places. There were times laid down for walking in the street, and proscriptions as to what you could eat or drink.

But as Dean Colet said (and this surely holds true today) it was not new laws England needed but a new spirit of justice in enforcing old laws. Traders had found a way of operating on the system's margins.

Instead of applying for licences needed to trade, they went on as they pleased and paid fines for not being licensed. It was better because they could come to a deal with bailiffs either on their own or with the help of more important friends. Thus, the annual fines for London in the later part of the 14th century totalled £72 18s 10d but all the collectors could offer was £17 0s 2d.

The French act on very much the same principle today; maybe we should look to our history and do likewise.