Ted Cruz is hated by his party, but he's the only man who can stop Trump

You may not like him. Indeed you may flat-out loathe him. But if you’re into politics as a craft, you’ve got to admit it. Senator Ted Cruz is running a terrific presidential campaign.

Consider where he was when he announced – the first Republican candidate to do so – back on 23 March last year. He was a long shot, an ultra-conservative who had engineered a deeply unpopular government shutdown, and on the Senate floor had called his own majority leader a liar. His colleagues couldn’t stand him (and mostly still can’t).

Yet here he is. Of the 17 original contenders for the Republican nomination, Cruz is one of just three still standing. He’s the closest rival of Donald Trump, and poised to secure a win in Wisconsin’s massively important primary on Tuesday. Trump, meanwhile, is coming off the worst week yet in his campaign, on the wrong end of a string of controversies and beset by growing evidence that he would lead Republicans to disaster in November.

A shellshocked party establishment casts around for a saviour. And who do their eyes light upon? Their erstwhile nemesis Ted Cruz.

On paper, Cruz is one of them. He had an Ivy League education at Princeton and Havard Law School. He worked for the George W. Bush’s Justice Department in Washington, and is a US Senator. What could be more establishment? Cruz, however, sensing early on what would be the driving emotion in this astonishing election cycle, has pitched himself as a man against the traditional order.

But that’s not the main reason why so many of his fellow Republicans in the Senate detest him. Rather, it’s his arrogance, his naked ambition, and his abiding obsession with himself. Why, runs a quip, do people take an instant dislike to Ted Cruz? Because it saves time.

Cruz reminds one of Denis Healey’s line on David Owen, as the former chancellor reflected on Labour’s civil wars of the 1980s. The good doctor, said Healey, was blessed with pretty much everything you need for success in politics: handsome looks, charisma and high intelligence. “Alas, along came the bad fairy, who tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘But you'll be a shit.’”

The curled lip semi-sneer that seems his default expression clearly bars Cruz from matinee idol status. But he’s a brilliant debater, lightning quick on his feet, and with a mind like a laser. The problem is that, for his Senate colleagues, the bad fairy was spot on.

Indeed, the bad impressions stretch back a long way. Craig Mazin, an old roomate of Cruz at Princeton has said publicly that he would rather have anybody else as president of the United States: “Anyone. I would rather pick somebody from the phone book.”

Most revealing has been the behaviour of Lindsey Graham, another leading Republican Senator who himself was briefly in the White House race. In February he joked that, if Cruz were murdered on the Senate floor and the Senate held the trial, there would be no conviction. But now even Graham is holding his nose and reluctantly backing his colleague as the last best hope of staving off a Trumpian apocalypse.

Cruz, of course, has had some luck along the way. The candidacy of Rand Paul, another Republican Senator with an anti-establishment message, never caught on. Meanwhile he just had to watch as Trump steam-rollered into oblivion most of the “establishment” candidates – not just Jeb Bush, but also Marco Rubio, once seen as Cruz’s most probable rival in a two-man Cuban-American showdown for the nomination.

But skilful politicians make their own luck. Long before he announced, Cruz had his game plan to win the White House. It was posited on the theory, contested by many experts but not disproven, that the key to victory is bringing to the polls the missing millions of white voters who passed on 2012 and the uninspiring candidacy of Mitt Romney. Forget courting independents or even Hispanics (his hard line on immigration had made Cruz few friends in that community). The priority was to mobilise the base.

Next came money. In the so-called “invisible primary” of fundraising he raised more than anyone except Bush. His finances secure, he then had to knock out rivals vying for conservative and evangelical support, vital in places like Iowa, the first state to vote. To this end, he built a ground organisation recalling that of Barack Obama in 2008, with campaign chairmen in every county of key early voting states.

Cruz duly won the Iowa caucuses. Separately, he studiously avoided confrontation with Trump and Ben Carson, another non-politician in the field who was then high in the polls. His calculation was that, assuming they dropped out, Cruz would pick up a fair chunk of their support. As much seems to have happened already with Carson. And all the while, he was running by far the best “ground game” of any candidate, already looking ahead to a convention where no-one entered with a majority of delegates, and where mastery of procedure would be crucial.

That’s why, thanks to knowing the local rules inside out, Cruz may emerge from Louisiana – whose primary was won by Trump – with the largest number of delegates. And that’s why you can be certain his campaign is already doing its utmost to ensure that as many convention delegates as possible are sympathetic to their man. These may be pledged to another candidate in the first ballot, but after that they are no longer bound, and all bets are off.

And so to Wisconsin. The inevitable clash with Trump has come, culminating in the squalid “battle of the wives”, in which Cruz earned at least a draw. But that is now overtaken by new rows, over the property mogul’s views on abortion, and his refusal to sack his campaign manager charged with manhandling and bruising a female reporter.

Just maybe, we are approaching the moment when the Trump express finally plunges off the rails. But whatever his sins, Trump has indisputably brought fresh voters to the polls, including Republicans who sat out 2012 – exactly the people Cruz seeks to galvanise this time around. Trump may have done the Texas senator’s work for him.

Cruz is still the underdog. Every pundit says he’s too conservative to win a general election. Bookmakers, not opinion polls, are the most reliable forecasters and PredictIt, which operates a leading “predictions market”, has Trump at 43 cents (the amount you must bet to win $1), and Cruz at 34 cents, to be the Republican nominee.

As for President Ted Cruz, that’s an even longer shot, at just 14 cents (Hillary Clinton, the strong favourite, is at 60 cents). Right now, though, why not set personal and ideological misgivings aside and watch a real political pro at work?