In 1975 a committee chaired by Lord Home recommended, first, that an annual challenge should be possible and, second, that both the absolute majority and the “surcharge” should be of all Conservative MPs rather than of those actually voting. These proposals became known as “Alec’s revenge” because Sir Edward had succeeded him in 1965 and because Lady Thatcher promptly and successfully challenged Sir Edward.But an untested possibility was all an annual challenge remained – until Sir Anthony Meyer in 1989. It was his historic function to demonstrate that the thIng could be attempted, the exercise mounted. He laid down the carpet for Mr Heseltine’s entrance next year. The only change that has been introduced since then is the 10 per cent trigger, shortly to be replaced by 25 per cent.The machinery now changes utterly for the equivalent of the old second ballot. The electorate is to consist not of Conservative MPs but of all members of the party.

As there are at least two cases which demonstrate, at any rate to the satisfaction of Her Majesty’s judges, that the Conservative Party has no legal existence and consequently can have no members, this may prove awkward No doubt these difficulties can be overcome. But others remain.For not only is it unclear whether a deposed Mr Hague can resubmit himself to the enlarged electorate, in which event he will almost certainly win. It also has to be established how many candidates these new voters are to have placed before their admiring eyes. Two, three, four? How is that list to be compiled by the MPs? And by what voting system is the final choice to be made by the party members? First-past-the-post continues to possess obvious attractions for the Conservative mind The alternative vote is fairer but more taxing The exhaustive ballot is fairer still, but takes longer. It was for this reason, combined with expense, that the Labour Party illegally substituted the alternative vote for the exhaustive ballot when Mr Tony Blair and Mr John Prescott were elected in 1994.The Labour leaders were chosen then by an electoral college rather than by a system of one member, one vote. The college is divided a third each into MPs, individual members and trade unionists who support (or say they support) the People’s Party.

True, the unionists vote as individuals rather than as blocks, even though the corrupt old block vote survives in attenuated form at the party conference. But potentially the new Conservative system is more democratic than the new Labour system which dates from 1993 and is largely the creation of John Smith.It may be that Mr Kenneth Clarke rather than Mr Hague would be leader if the new system had been in place immediately after the general election. What I am reasonably sure of today is that the Tories are now, as people used to say in the war, stuck with Mr Hague for the duration.. FOR SOME rich people who have known poverty, it is the food they can’t bear to waste that gives away their background.

Or wardrobes stuffed with clothes, as if they can’t believe their gold card really works, and keep trying it out again and again With Ian Wright it is shoes. He can tell the precise make of a person’s footwear from 20 paces. When he meets someone for the first time, he looks straight at their feet. When he was young he went through scores of shoes, bought to be worn for church, kicking balls around the south-east London council estate where he grew up, until his mum refused to buy any more.

Now that the Arsenal striker’s feet have made him a millionaire – they are worth pounds 100,000 a year in Nike sponsorship alone – he has dozens of pairs of shoes, many of them handmade.
In the latest episode in a remarkable career, he is to host a chat-show starting this Friday, which LWT is promoting with the slogan: “These boots were made for talking.” Guests would be well advised to choose their footwear carefully.Given his head, Wright should be a charismatic host, offering a dangerous edge of unpredictability that is not part of the repertoire of Michael Parkinson, who appears simultaneously on BBC1. Unlike most professional footballers, Ian Wright has not spent most of his life institutionalised by the game, tightly controlled and protected from the outside world. It gives him an attractive, if sometimes volatile, spontaneity.A FORMER plasterer, he still finds it hard to believe that apparently sane people want to pay him inordinate sums of money to run around a football pitch, doing the thing he loves above all else. That people should now want to pay him hard cash to sit on a couch and talk to other celebrities must seem even more incomprehensible.Wrighty was born in Woolwich, in south-east London, in 1963, the third child of Herbert Maclean and Nesta Wright. Maclean walked out when Wright was four, leaving four children who took their mother’s maiden name. “It was my mum who was the driving force behind our family,” says Wright.