The Tory front runner's flying start should make the Prime Minister look over his shoulder

Slightly contradicting their reputation as the stupid party, Conservative MPs have managed to do the best they could in a difficult position. Yet the emergence of Michael Howard as the likely next leader, probably without a meaningful ballot of the party members, only draws attention to how bad things have become for the official opposition.

Tory MPs were right to drop Iain Duncan Smith. He said on becoming leader that he had three months to make an impression on the public. After two years in the job, 47 per cent could not name him in an Independent NOP poll, and most of those who could had formed a negative impression.

Nearly anyone would be a better Leader of the Opposition than him. But not necessarily that much better, and the phrases spoilt for choice and embarrassment of riches do not apply on this occasion. Indeed, the real embarrassment is the thinness of the field, and the real difficulty in choosing Mr Duncan Smith's successor is in judging the balance of positives and negatives among a collection of variously compromised candidates.

Political competence

It is hard to disagree with the assessment that Mr Howard offers the party - by a small margin - the best prospect of raising its game against Labour. But it is a measure of the Tory party's predicament that it has known, deep down, that Mr Duncan Smith was not a credible leader within three months of his election, and in all the time since then the strongest candidate to emerge as an alternative is the 62-year-old former Home Secretary. Instead of a bright young charismatic unknown making his mark over the past two years, in the style of Mr Blair, we have an old-timer who was previously written off as unelectable.

Mr Howard's speech launching his candidacy yesterday can have filled few hearts with excitement. But it demonstrated a basic level of political competence that Mr Duncan Smith never sustained. Indeed, its significance lay in that the comparison that sprang to mind was not with the unfortunate former leader but with the Prime Minister. The Blairite borrowings - "I was not born into this party; I chose it" - underlined the ease with which Mr Howard plays in the same league as the Prime Minister.

Not only that, the speech was crafted to show that he intends to play against Mr Blair on the same part of the political field - the centre. The language of inclusiveness - and even the phrasing on Europe, that it must not be a source of rigidity - could have come from Mr Blair himself.

What is more, Mr Howard has been on the sensible side of the argument in the Shadow Cabinet over the stance the party should adopt on tax cuts. He recognises that they must wait until they can win people's trust on delivering top-quality public services.

He also hinted that he recognises that more work is needed on the policies he helped to develop under IDS. Although the new policies of raising the state pension, abolishing tuition fees and bringing in health-care vouchers have a populist appeal, they are all open to the criticism that they are an expensive way of subsidising the better-off.

Authoritarian past

Yet Mr Howard arrives with his own negative baggage, too. Whatever this newspaper's reservations about the authoritarianism of Tony Blair and David Blunkett on crime, Mr Howard's record as Home Secretary, 1993-97, was worse in one respect. At least the Labour government has devoted some thought and some resources to the causes of crime - the second half of Mr Blair's famous mantra. Mr Howard and the Conservatives have long lacked imagination in this area.

And, for all that Mr Howard is a credible prime-ministerial candidate, his human side does not come across well on television.

Even if Mr Howard is, on balance, the best of a mixed lot, it is easy to understand the resentment of the party members if they are denied the chance to decide that for themselves. But in 2001, the only time the mechanism has been used, the members made the wrong choice, of Mr Duncan Smith over Kenneth Clarke. (It was another good sign that Mr Howard is seeking to find some role for the only other big hitter the party can field.)

A self-obsessed party

The introduction of one-member, one-vote should have forced the grass-roots out of their self-obsession, as it did with Labour. But it has not. And it is now too late for the party to undergo the kind of revolution that would reconnect its membership (average age over 60) with the centre ground of British politics in time for an election that may be only 19 months away. It may not look pretty, but Tory MPs are therefore justified in reverting to the system by which they alone choose the leader.

The test that matters is the response of Mr Blair. It was telling that he tried to characterise Mr Howard's imminent elevation as making the difference between Labour and Tories as more "stark", when the reality of Mr Howard's pitch was the opposite.

It may be too much to suggest that Mr Howard is the candidate Labour most fear. But there was a sense yesterday that the contest between the two largest parties in our two-and-a-half-party system could become competitive again.