Media favourites

There was a time not that long ago when David Davis was not only the bookmakers' favourite to be next Conservative leader, but also the favoured candidate of the membership. Even after Ken Clarke entered the race and often topped the polls as the "popular choice", Davis could always beat him. Now Davis languishes in second place behind David Cameron.

The popular explanation for Davis's reversal of fortunes is that at Conference, Cameron delivered an exemplary speech while Davis offered a tedious one. Neither description quite fits the speech it relates to. Cameron's was well delivered but empty (Lord Bell likened it to a Chinese meal - nice at the time, but fifteen minutes later and it's left you feeling empty), while Davis's had some interesting points but was poorly delivered. But it's hard to believe that this alone would take Cameron from 8% to 33% support between MORI polls.

So why has David Cameron gone up and David Davis gone down? After all, Davis is the same man he was a month ago, and Cameron is only a month more experienced. I think it's largely attributable to the media hype machine. When David Davis was doing well among Conservative supporters, the Sunday Telegraph (which is probably read by the majority of those supporters) seemed to give Davis a favourable profile every week. Could the connection be between the coverage and its tone and the man's popularity?

All the evidence suggests the answer is "yes". The coverage of Ken Clarke's launch saw him leap by twelve points between Populus polls. Is it too hard to believe that systematic negative coverage of Davis and uncritical coverage of Cameron, could be having a similarly distorting effect...

At the moment Cameron leads the polls of the Tory membership. It seems clear to me that the power of the media is so great that its own hyping of a candidate can achieve the apotheosis of the recipient and create the poll lead. The thing that is dishonest is the way the media pretends that the reaction to their agitprop is spontaneous.

Sadly the membership will have little chance to see the candidates for themselves and make a judgment based on that. The hustings don't start until after the ballot papers go out, and my local one is only four days before the polls close...

We need to use what time we have to look at what the candidates stand for and what they want to do. Those should be grounds for selecting a leader, not the directions of the media. The media can build a candidate up, but they can later knock him down. We saw this with David Davis's journey from hero to zero.

On the day of Davis's Conference speech, Lord Bell said that if he'd been writing the script for the week, Cameron and Clarke would deliver good speeches while Davis would deliver a less good speech. It was the narrative the media wanted, he said, as many of them didn't like the then frontrunner and wanted to do him down. The challenge for Davis now is to show that his experience has given him the ability to overcome this trial of adversity. If he can contrast his substance with that of David Cameron, he should be able to show us why he still deserves to win.