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When someone asks this question one's mind immediately leaps to two possibilities - Ken Clarke and Michael Portillo. V-J has already done a splendid job of covering the latter, and, for various reasons not least his enthusiastic support of European integration, Clarke is very unlikely unless he makes significant concessions to the right.

My thoughts aren't on those two but on two figures who might have, but for the unexpected twists and turns that you often find on politics, had a good chance of leading the party in 1997 - Michael Howard and Malcolm Rifkind, Major's Home and Foreign Secretaries respectively. Howard, of course, stood in the real life 1997 leadership election and lost, dismally. He also has the disadvantage of being seen as a rather cold and sinister character. But I don't think a Howard win in 1997 is implausible - he was after all unanimously elected in 2003! Howard had the advantage of being on the Right of the party, a firm Eurosceptic and Thatcherite, without having the cloud of disloyalty hanging over him as it did with Redwood and to a lesser extent, Portillo. With Portillo's defeat in 1997 the Right of the party were flung into chaos, which explains why they backed Hague who a month or two earlier, might have seemed an unlikely choice.

So how can we get Howard to win? I can see two PoDs being necessary. Firstly, Hague doesn't stand and instead becomes Howard's no.2, as he very nearly did in real life. This means that Howard becomes the heavyweight candidate of the right in the leadership election - Redwood is unlikely to win due to having stood against Major in 1995, as well has having 'personality' issues, while Lilley was never really seen as a serious contender. The second PoD is to remove Ann Widdecombe's infamous intervention in the middle of the race describing him as having 'something of the night about him'. I'm split on how to deal with this - the simplest thing would be to avoid the Derek Lewis scandal of the Major government completely, but I think Howard's exemplary Parliamentary performance in the debate on that subject, when he crushed Jack Straw, probably did his leadership prospects no harm. The other option is that he sacks Derek Lewis in such a manner as that it doesn't give rise to Widdecombe's hostility.

The other contender I mentioned was Rifkind. He, of course, lost his seat in 1997 by about 4000 votes. Edinburgh Pentlands was quite marginal anyway (he held it in 1992 by a majority of 4500), so although it's not impossible to avoid him losing his seat, I think it's unlikely without a better national campaign, which would almost certainly result in Portillo being returned to Parliament and standing for the leadership. One could also avoid the scandals that hit the Scottish Tory Party during the election, which might save them one or two seats, but I doubt it would save them Rifkind's. So I suppose the answer there would be to change the constituency boundaries during the boundary review that went on during the 1992 - 1997 Parliament to remove some of the more Labour inclined areas of the Pentlands seat (it's actually a heavily socially divided seat - a mixture of prosperous suburbs and grim tower blocks) and bring in either other prosperous neighbourhoods that were in Edinburgh South historically, or semi-rural areas outside the city boundaries. This would make the Pentlands seat significantly safer, and with a slightly better campaign in Scotland, enable Rifkind to hold onto his seat and possibly allow the Tories to hold Eastwood (a similar seat near Glasgow, except more solidly Tory) too.

Rifkind had morphed into something of a moderate Eurosceptic by 1997 and has lost a lot of the wet baggage that he had carried around during the Thatcher years. For example, he got into a slanging match with Clarke during the campaign when he said that the Tories were opposed to the Euro. Providing that he keeps his seat, he should stand and have a good chance of winning on a unity ticket - one that is somewhat Eurosceptic but manages to have some appeal to the left of the Party.

What does everyone think? Is there something in this or am I talking a load of rubbish?
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