Can Priti Patel shake up the Tory leadership contest?

After the heaviest general election defeat since the dawn of modern politics in 1832, it is remarkable that there are six people vying to be the next leader of the Conservative Party.

- SEAN O'GRADY

Whoever wins will, most likely, spend the coming years as leader of the opposition - one of the worst jobs in politics - in charge of a denuded, demoralised and mostly talentless party at a time when the public would rather not listen to them. It’s a tough gig, but somebody’s got to do it… and despite the torpor of political summer, there have been modest signs of life in the contest…

Are we talking about Dame Priti Patel?

Yes we are. “Launching” her leadership campaign, even though it has been running for some weeks now, Patel reinforced her fairly blatant appeal to Tory members to elect her in return for rather more say in the way the party is run.

She identifies as a grassroots activist, she says, and laid the flattery on with a trowel for those 170,000 members she calls “the heart and soul of our party”. She’d give them a directly-elected party chair, there’d be no more “parachuted in” metropolitan elite types standing as candidates, and much else besides.

Will that be enough to win it?

Probably not. If she made it to the final two candidates that go forward to the membership-wide vote, she might stand a chance with such a formidable charm offensive. However, many of her parliamentary colleagues think handing over more power to the Tory membership – so grotesquely unrepresentative of the wider population – would be electoral suicide.