Nadine Dorries got it wrong about David Cameron being next Conservative leader. But he might well be the one after that.

Lord Cameron had his political appetite restored by being lured out of his shepherd's hut and is now weighing-up a sensational comeback to the House of Commons

Photo by Cassie Boca on Unsplash

IT COULD be that within three weeks the Conservative party won’t be worth analysing anymore because it will almost have disappeared as a parliamentary force.

But for now the central expectation is that the Tories will cling on as the official party of opposition in the House of Commons, even if they have fewer than 100 seats.

So the future of Conservatism, capital C, will probably remain a dominant factor in the far more crucial future of conservatism with a lower-case, philosophical c.

And more than anything, this means the identity of the next Tory leader – and which wing of the party she, or less likely he, is drawn from – will become the immediate focus. Perhaps it will be Kemi Badenoch – the right-winger that the Tory left thinks it could live with. Perhaps it will be Penny Mordaunt - if she hangs on to her seat due to a big personal vote – the left-winger who seems remarkably to have generated strong support among the Tory grassroots membership. Perhaps it will be Robert Jenrick and perhaps he really will sustain his new fundamentalist lines on leaving the ECHR and slashing immigration rather than tacking back towards the “centre ground”. Perhaps even a more conventional Cabinet “wet” such as James Cleverly will get over the line – though that seems pretty unlikely to me.

Yet the contest that could really count is the election for the Tory leader after next. There is every chance that the first leader of the much-reduced Tory party in Parliament doesn’t make it to the next general election. If they don’t make big progress fast then people will say they are not up to it and talk of the need to bring back an established, election-winning “Big Beast”.

As one of those once put it – the one who studied Classics at Oxford 40 years ago - Cincinnatus may answer the call to return from his plough to rescue the failing Tory empire. Boris Johnson, for it is he, will almost certainly be seeking an early return to the Commons at a suitably cushy by-election. From there, he will bank on his electoral record in the Brexit referendum as well as the 2019 general election turning him into the obvious choice to lead the party into the 2029 contest.

From a Boris point of view, buying back into the Tory stock when it has hit rock bottom looks like a pretty smart move. But he almost certainly won’t be the only Big Beast thinking this.

In recent days I have picked up some remarkable indications that another is once again on the prowl. The noble Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton has by all accounts