The Tory leadership race has started, and Osborne's trailing in third behind Boris and Michael Gove

By Nigel Jones for the Daily Mail

Published: 15:46 GMT, 31 May 2012 | Updated: 15:47 GMT, 31 May 2012

While all eyes may be fixed on the runners and riders at the London Olympics later this summer, the roar of the crowd might have drowned out the crack of another sort of starting gun to launch a very different kind of race: the sprint to be the next Tory leader.

Bang! The first shot of the pistol was fired as Boris Johnson won re-election as London's Mayor, and came out smiling on a dismal day for his unpopular party -  the only Tory in the land to be a proven vote winner, even in the Labour leaning capital.

Hardly had the bubbles in the Mayor's victory Champagne turned flat when Crack! Boris followed up his success at the polls with a newspaper article advocating a referendum on whether Britain should or should not remain a member of the increasingly troubled European Union.

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The only winner in the Tory party: Boris Johnson's victory in the London mayoral elections effectively fired the starting gun for his campaign to replace David Cameron as Conservative leader

Boris's piece was, of course, distinctly and deliberately unhelpful to his old school and university chum David Cameron, who would like nothing more than for the whole issue of Europe to be swept under the carpet and forgotten. But with the EU coming apart at the seams as first Greece and now Spain find the strain of being part of the Euro unendurable, and more and more Britons waking up to the unfolding disaster that our membership of the EU has proved to be, Europe is an issue whose time has come - with a vengeance.

As ever responsive to the public mood, canny old Boris had put his finger unerringly on to the sore spot that, more than any other, both irritates Dave and wrings the withers of the Tory party members who will choose the next leader. (A Channel 4/Conservative Home poll this week found that three out of four Tory members want  an In/Out referendum).

Ever alert to the Mayor's manoeuvres, the next Tory to get his spikes onto the running blocks was George Osborne. The Chancellor, still smarting under the lashing his woeful Budget received from the general public and economic pundits alike, strove to disguise the U-turns he has been forced to make to correct his Budgetary errors, by getting his minions in the Press and party to put the story about that he is 'considering' getting a pledge to hold an EU referendum into the Tory manifesto at the next General Election. (When he is not moonlighting as part-time Chancellor, your see, George's day job is to be Tory election strategy supremo - and what a fine job he is making of it too!)

Contender: George Osborne is known to covet the role of leader, but has been damaged by his March Budget

There are several problems with this strategy. They include a) Since Dave already gave what he called a 'cast iron guarantee' to hold a referendum before the LAST election - and then welshed on the pledge - who is going to believe it the second time around? As the old adage has it, 'fool me once; shame on you. Fool me twice; shame on me'.

b) The rise and rise of UKIP. The anti-EU party has already hoovered up thousands of  formerly loyal Tories  and looks set fair to become the largest party at 2014's elections to the EU's rubber stamp European Parliament (they are already the second largest). Osborne's ploy would look like a panicky response to the threat from a real true blue conservative party, rather than the quivering pink jelly it has become under Cameron and himself . 

Finally c) events will make Osborne's idea dead in the water before it has even been floated. The Euro may well implode, leaving the EU itself resembling an Emperor minus his clothes, bereft of its sole reason for existing. Labour may well snatch the Chancellor's own clothes by pipping him first with their own pledge to hold a referendum. But, most fatally of all for Osborne's previously high hopes of succeeding Dave as leader and PM, if he continues to make a Horlicks of his task of rescuing the economy, and the Government continues to fiddle and fumble, he will go down with the sinking ship, as fatally tied to his Prime Minister as a previous Chancellor, Ken Clarke was to the Titanic wreck that was John Major's Government in 1997.

Impressive: Michael Gove leaves the Leveson Inquiry after mounting a strident defence of press freedom

So with Osborne out of the race, before Boris began to burnish his victory speech, a still small voice spoke out this week at the Leveson inquiry. That voice, with its soft Scottish burr, made an eloquent defence of press freedom (at the same time putting the puffed up inquiry firmly back in its box) - that won universal plaudits from the practitioners of that freedom: the ladies and  gentlemen of the press  themselves. The voice belonged to Education Secretary Michael Gove.

Gove had already won golden opinions among commentators for being about the only Coalition minister - (apart from the dry and spinsterish Philip Hammond, and IDS who has already had his turn at being leader) - who has not made a complete hash of his job. His stubborn policy of creating Free Schools for bright youngsters against the frenzied opposition of the left-wing educational establishment has been one of the few bright spots in the Coalition's otherwise abysmal performance.

And make no mistake. Gove's tart remarks to Leveson - like Boris's referendum article - were not a coincidence. Beyond their ostensible audience, they were aimed at a specific constituency: Tory MPs and the dwindling ranks of party members. What they were both saying, was 'Hey! Look at me! Unlike Dave, I'm a real Conservative and I support our freedom and liberty! When the time comes for you to elect a proper Tory leader (and it might be quite soon) vote for me!'

If the contest to succeed Dave, however he finally founders, comes down to a two horse race between Boris and Gove, who will finally mount the winner's rostrum to take gold? Both men have their faults, as well as their plus points.

In Boris's case these seem only too obvious: his tendency to play the buffoon, his extra-marital dalliances, and his slightly slippery habit of telling people what they want to hear. (He is not, for example, as anti-EU as his rhetoric suggests, firmly backing the admission of his ancestral homeland, Turkey, which would potentially allow some 70 million Anatolian peasants to stream across Europe's already porous borders).

Gove, apart from resembling the school swot, and sharing Boris's habit of using Latin phrases that few understand to demonstrate what clever clogs they are, was tarnished by the expenses scandal,  is also tainted by his membership of the catastrophic Coaliton, and has yet to demonstrate that he has Boris's vote-pulling power .

For me, its an especially tough choice. I owe both men a favour. Early in my journalistic career, when they were editors on the Spectator (Boris)  and Times (Gove) respectively  and before they had begun their meteoric political ascents, I sold them both articles purely on the strength of hurried phone calls before they had even met me. I'm grateful for that leg up. But it proved something else: both men are risk takers, willing to take a punt on a hunch. In our increasingly serious situation we need to take risks - apart from anything else its the mark of a true Tory. So Boris or Govey: who's it to be?

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