Portillo says he feels relieved after defeat

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON, JULY 18. In a sensational upset, Mr. Michael Portillo has crashed out of the Tory leadership contest barely five days after he emerged as a front-runner and the bookies' favourite to succeed Mr. William Hague as the party chief.

Equally sensationally, the struggling Mr. Kenneth Clarke has been catapulted to the top of the table after Tuesday's third and final round of Tory MPs' ballot to shortlist two candidates, one of whom would then be elected by the party's 300,000 mass members. He admitted he was `surprised' by his own performance. The second candidate on the shortlist is the shadow defence secretary, Mr. Ian Duncan Smith, a Thatcherite widely seen to be more in tune with the conservative instincts of the Tory grassroots than the socially liberal and eurosceptic Mr. Clarke. His critics portray him as ``Hague without gags'' to emphasise his lack of charisma compounded by the fact that he even lacks Mr. Hague's penchant for one-liners and smart repartee.

Stunned by his defeat, Mr. Portillo announced his retirement from frontline politics saying: ``I think time has come for me to look for other things to do.'' He ruled out serving in a future shadow cabinet and said he would rather seek a career in the media or business, while continuing to be an MP. ``Apart from anything else, I would just get in their way,'' he said in an acerbic reference to the new party regime. He would continue to be the shadow chancellor until a new leader is elected.

Mr. Portillo was the first to throw his hat in the ring when the leadership race began a few weeks ago after Mr. Hague resigned taking responsibility for the party's debacle in the general election, and he led the field consistently despite widespread scepticism over his conversion from Thatcherism to social liberalism. He continued to be a favourite even after the more experienced and charismatic Mr. Clarke belatedly joined the contest.

In the first two ballots - the second held last Thursday - he got the highest number of votes followed by Mr. Smith who was eight votes behind him. Mr. Clarke came a poor third. But a week is a long time in politics, as Mr. Portillo was to discover.

Three damaging developments destroyed his hopes. First was a tendentious survey in The Daily Mail which claimed that a majority of Tory members did not want him to be their leader; the second was the screening of a video diary secretly filmed by Mr. Hague's former media chief, Ms. Amanda Platell, during the election campaign alleging that Mr. Portillo had been disloyal to Mr. Hague; and the third was a very public and very angry denial by Mrs. Margaret Thatcher that she supported Mr. Portillo. The denial followed a front page story in The Sunday Telegraph quoting a member of Mrs. Thatcher's ``inner circle'' as saying that she preferred Mr. Portillo to Mr. Smith because she believed he was more experienced.

According to Mr. Portillo's supporters - derisively nicknamed `Portillistas' because of his Spanish origin - these developments took the fight out of him as believed that there were too many people gunning for him. ``He lost the appetite,'' said one supporter. Mr. Portillo, trying to make a virtue of his defeat, said in a way he was relieved because even if he were to win it would have been with a very narrow margin - not enough to get the backing for the sort of radical changes that he believed the party needed in order to become electable again.

The race began with five contenders and while Mr. Michael Ancram, who had resigned as party's chairman to offer himself as a `unity' candidate, was eliminated in a previous round Mr. David Davis widely seen at one stage as a dark horse pulled out after he did not poll sufficient votes.

The Tories are now confronted with a stark choice in opting for either Mr. Clarke or Mr. Smith. The contrast between the two - personality-wise as well as in outlook - could not have been sharper. Mr. Clarke is a party grandee with years of experience as a minister in different capacities, whereas Mr. Smith has never been a minister. Mr. Clarke is an extrovert and a liberal to his finger tips - and of course deeply eurosceptic. Mr. Smith is a largely untested commodity, and the closest his supporters have come to describe him is that he is a ``nice family man''. His biggest asset in a party which is deeply europhobic is his own europhobia but critics say even Mr. Hague had loads of it. That did not help him lead the party to a poll win.

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