Clarke out

The UK Tories have just had the first ballot for their next leader and the results were:

David Davis 62
David Cameron 56
Liam Fox 42
Ken Clarke 38 (and eliminated)

The big winner is David Cameron. He got 16 more votes than the 40 pledged him to him, while Davis got 5 less than he had publicly pledged.

And as Clarke, not Fox fell out, this means Cameron is basically guaranteed to make the final two members vote as he will I estimate get 30 of Clarke’s vote which will put him to over 80.

It is possible Davis may not even make final two. Fox is going to aggressively target Davis and if he gets ten defections, he will go into the final round.

It’s hard to sum up for people back home how much publicity there has been about David Cameron. For the last week every newspaper (I love having eight papers a day to read) has been doing major stories on Cameron refusing to confirm or deny that he may have used drugs while at university. Far from damaging him, he has gained huge public support for refusing to say, including from many media. And even the fact everyone assumes he did of course once take drugs, this actually makes him seem more normal to younger voters.

Then it came out that he had a close relative who had a heroin addiction and he had been helping him through that – making him look Mr down to earth. This then got complemented by two page profiles on him in all the papers. None of the other candidates have been quoted on anything other than whether they think Cameron should answer the question or not.

The final turn was when a photo got published of his campaign manager George Osborne, the shadow Chancellor, with a woman now known as “Miss Pain” who is a dominatrix claiming they once did cocaine together. The photo though is from when he was 22, and she was dating a friend of hers so doesn’t prove anything. Was a bizarre aspect to the whole thing.

Anyway the drugs issue has died down and the next vote is on Thursday, After that it goes out to 300,000 members to vote.