With Cameron limping from one bad week to another, a leadership contest cannot be far away

By Nigel Jones for the Daily Mail

Published: 17:51 GMT, 6 May 2012 | Updated: 09:55 GMT, 7 May 2012

It was a Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, who famously said that 'a week is a long time in politics' and at the end of his roughest seven days in the job David Cameron would doubtless agree.

Except that the next seven days, with more Leveson revelations and the Queen's Speech both looming, look like they will be even rougher.

After Thursday's local council elections, which saw the Tories lose nearly 400 seats and Labour gain twice as many, Cameron had to watch with a rictus grin as the Tories' sole remaining star, his fellow Old Etonian and Bullingdon Club chum Boris Johnson, squeaked in as Mayor of London over the horror mask candidate Ken Livingstone.

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Helpless: David Cameron assesses the damage in Thursday's local elections, which saw the Conservatives lose 400 seats

It wasn't so much a vote of confidence in adenoidal geek Ed Miliband's Labour party - memories of the Blair-Brown disaster are still a little fresh for that  and only 12% of electors voted Labour - but it was certainly a ringing vote of no confidence at all in Cameron's empty shell of a government.

With only 32% turning out to vote, previously loyal Tories, their patience strained beyond breaking point by Dave's inanities,  either stayed home in their droves, or cast their votes for UKIP, the only party that promises the only referendum that the British people actually desire, but which Cameron has repeatedly denied: on extracting ourselves from the unfolding disaster of the European Union.

Of those few who did bother to vote, a vanishingly small proportion cast their ballots for the Cameron Conservatives or their pathetic coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, who saw their total of councillors fall below 3,000 for the first time since their party was founded.

Gains: Labour Party leader Ed Miliband is congratulated by supporters in Birmingham

It is clear that the dog's breakfast that passes for Coalition policy - tax breaks for the rich and rises for everyone else; creating more expensive levels of the unwanted  and unecessary political class  as mayors and elected Lords; racking up our debts yet further; ladling foreign aid to countries that either don't need or don't appreciate it; asking 'how high?' when European bureaucrats and judges say 'jump!'; letting rip unlimited immigration and refusing to kick out convicted terrorists - have zero appeal for the British people.

The recriminations that followed the local elections debacle have been predictable: a few Tory Lords from yesteryear have come leaping in to advise the party to stick to the chosen course and not rock the boat, while the Tories have ludicrously wheeled out another Peer, Lord Strathclyde, who looks like Billy Bunter's dad, as the best man to deny that they are the party of the posh and the privileged. So much for Cameron's famed PR skills.

Meanwhile, the Tories' own financial wizard, Chancellor George Osborne, has been touring the TV studios as the official face of the Government's response to their polls defeat. In another triumph of Dave's PR, the man who got us into this fine mess has been trying to convince us that he is the best chap to get us out of it, instead of paying for it with his job.

Clean-up operation: The Conservatives have wheeled out Lord Strathclyde and George Osborne to improve the party's image

Not by changing his policies you understand, but by persisting  with the omnishambles that has forced us into a double dip recession. Since Osborne's economic experience is less extensive than the treasurer of your neighbourhood snooker club, his has been an entirely unconvincing performance.

But enough of Osborne, who is merely the monkey to Dave's organ grinder. The most interesting reaction to the elections, has not come from the party's Grandees or the Camerloons themselves, but from a humble backbencher, Nadine Dorries.

The member for mid-Bedfordshire, has, admittedly never been among Dave's adoring Tory female cheerleaders: no Louise Mensch, she! Nadine, sneeringly dubbed 'Mad Nad' by the Camerloons for her outspokenness, is a Tory rarity: being a working class woman whose instincts are in accord with the social group - the white working class - most ignored these days by all three mainstream parties.

'Mad Nad': Tory MP Nadine Dorries has been outspoken in her criticism of David Cameron

As such she has from the outset been a stern critic of the 'out-of-touch posh boys' as she calls the Cameron clique who have taken control of the once mighty Conservative party. Like many salt-of-the-earth Tories Nadine's phoniness detector has spotted Dave and his pals for what they are; lightweight, unprincipled, metropolitan liberals with not a Tory bone in their jellied bodies. And now she has told the Mail on Sunday that unless Cameron changes his Liberal-yellow spots sharpish he's going to have to go.

Last week I called here for a new Airey Neave - the Tory backbencher who in 1974/5 organised the ousting of  Edward Heath to make way for Margaret Thatcher - to begin collecting the 46 signatures needed for the Tory backbench body, the 1922 Committee, to call a vote of no confidence in the party leader and thus trigger a leadership election. Now Nadine Dorries has echoed my call, adding moreover that moves are already underway to do precisely that no later than this Christmas.

To be honest, I don't quite believe that things  have gone this far yet. But be assured that they may yet do so. In the coming week another troublesome woman, Dave's erstwhile horse-riding chum Rebekah Brooks, is due to give evidence to the Leveson inquiry on the former close links between News International' and the Prime Minister. There has been talk of a dozen emails a day flying between the pair.

Another Leveson witness who could be even more embarrassing for Dave is Andy Coulson, the former News  of the World editor brilliantly hand picked by Osborne and Cameron to be their media spokesman.

Both Brooks and Coulson are now facing charges in connection with the Hackgate scandal, and explicit evidence linking them with Dave and Osborne's Downing Street will be at best unhelpful, at worst politically fatal for the discredited duo. It is indeed ironic that the man whose self-appointed mission was to de-toxify the Tory 'brand' has proved to be pure electoral poison, making his party perhaps terminally unpopular.

The gaffe-strewn weeks since Osborne's Budget have been a long Black Wednesday for Dave and his misconceived project, from which there can be no crawling back. When this realisation finally sinks in, and Tory MPs wake up to the electoral annihilation they are facing with Dave, perhaps those 46 signatures will be collected sooner than we can yet imagine. A week is indeed a long time in politics.

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