The Conservative party’s leadership contest has reached a point which may well come to be looked back upon as a watershed in the party’s development. With Ken Clarke being knocked out in the first of two votes by Tory MPs, it is clear that one of the two contenders who will go through to the hustings among the party in the country will be the boy from County Charisma, David Cameron. What is also clear is that, given the rapturous reception Cameron has received from party members and the lacklustre performance by David Davis, a run-off between Cameron and Davis would result almost certainly in a victory for Cameron. This provides a golden opportunity for the most under-rated and least talked-about candidate, Dr Liam Fox, to get Davis’s backers to switch to him in the MPs’ second vote tomorrow, on the basis that it is Fox who has the best chance of winning against Cameron.

This is almost certainly true. The reason is not that Davis is a poor orator or that he is personally unpopular, true as these may be. It is that he does not have a clear and consistent position but is more a blank sheet of paper on which anyone who can persuade him that they possess a winning formula can write a set of policy prescriptions. More pertinently still, he is not driven by a realisation of the destruction that has been wrought upon social and moral order in Britain by the culture wars and the attack upon the nation, and thus does not have a coherent vision of what needs to be done to rescue it before it slides off the cliff altogether.

This means that he is unable to land killer punches upon Cameron, who represents — by his own admission — a libertarian agenda which, even though he would doubtless deny it, lines him up squarely in the camp that is doing the damage to this country’s values and traditions in the name of ‘modernity’ and ‘change’. All Davis can do in these circumstances is to claim that Cameron’s actual agenda is — so far — vacuous and content-free. But then his own is not exactly rock-solid either. It would boil down to a contest between the aprincipled and the unprincipled. And Cameron has the killer factor on his side in such a contest. He’s got charm.

A contest between Cameron and Liam Fox, however, would be a very different matter. Fox undoubtedly has drawbacks. He has a reputation for light-weightedness, with a tendency to go in for shameless stunts and gimmicks which make him look ridiculous; he has never quite shaken off the impression that he remains a junior doctor in rag week. Nevertheless, the speeches he has been making recently have deservedly boosted his reputation and surprised people by their solidity and substance. This is because Fox actually has a set of unshakeable political beliefs founded upon a strong attachment to the nation and to moral codes such as personal responsibility, the rediscovery of which is the key to repairing social cohesion. He is thus categorised by our amoral, nation-despising, socially wrecking media as ‘right-wing’ and a ‘Thatcherite’.

If he were to upset the apple-cart tomorrow and face Cameron in the final showdown in the country, party members would finally be forced to confront the question which has been niggling away throughout their wilderness years of squabbling purposelessness. That question is simply whether they want to be conservatives any more, or whether they will sign up to anything — however vacuous or socially destructive it may be —which they think will win power. Mesmerised since 1997 by Tony Blair, they would now have the opportunity that so many in the party have wanted for so long — to elect in David Cameron their very own Tory Blair. They would thus be paying the greatest possible homage to the Labour leader and signalling unequivocally — in accepting Blair’s false assertion that he is the centre ground of British politics — that British conservatism has disappeared up its own fundament.

Dr Fox would offer them a clear alternative, the opportunity to restate the conservative defence of this country’s fundamental values. Would they decide, however, that the country has indeed changed irrevocably and that conservative values now merely put people off? If so, they must then be asked: what is the point any more of the Conservative party? Why should the country at large vote for Blair-lite when — in Cameron’s own phrase — they can have the real thing?

If there is to be such a run-off, Fox will have to raise his game once again. He will have to show that his conservatism can reach out to the famous middle ground of floating voters. It can be done, by presenting his ideas in the context of repairing the country, protecting the vulnerable and restoring fairness. In other words, a true one-nation agenda which reclaims the language of social reform from its debasement into its polar opposite, and which shows how the modernisers’ talk of social inclusion actually fragments society and drives people apart and abandons those at the bottom of the heap.

Or it might be Cameron v Davis. In which case, the Conservative party will almost certainly leap into uncharted waters — and leave many high and dry.