If John’s record is so strong, and potential contribution so significant, how come he’s not being paid? Is he being punished for something? What can poor John have done wrong? Or does the party no longer value defence? Maybe it didn’t want an armed forces minister at all but felt bound by a manifesto commitment. It is not credible that Mr Redwood or, in the foreseeable future, Mr Hague, could manage that feat. It is quite easy to imagine Mr Clarke doing so.The Blair government has so far proved sure-footed and better prepared than anyone dared expect But the going will get rough. There will be arguments within government over public spending, over Europe, over constitutional reform.

And every effort will be made to cover them up by the most centralist and effective propaganda machine ever seen in British politics. It will be the job of the Leader of the Opposition to see that they don’t get away with it. Who would most credibly attack the Blair administration for reneging on its promises to restore the NHS? John Redwood, who for all his more recent repositioning wrote a Centre for Policies Studies pamphlet in the 1980s suggesting a massive expansion of the private health sector? Or William Hague, whose views on many issues, the long-term future of the NHS among them, have yet to be articulated? Or Mr Clarke, who fought, along with Nigel Lawson, a long battle to stop Mrs Thatcher giving tax breaks to those opting for private care? The surest way for an opposition leader to embarrass a prime minister is to attack him in terms that strike a chord with the silently disgruntled government backbenchers opposite. In a political system notably short on constitutional checks and balances against the executive, the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition is an important part of the constitution.
We happen to think that, of the available candidates for the Tory leadership, Mr Clarke would make the best Conservative prime minister. He is outward- looking, undoctrinaire on Europe, and has a traditional one-nation Tory sense of social responsibility But that is hypothetical at present.

More to the point is that he would also make easily the most effective Leader of the Opposition. Mr Clarke holds to the view, articulated by his political hero Iain MacLeod after Labour’s last landslide in 1966, that “in parliament it should not only be the duty but the pleasure of an opposition to oppose”. Partly, that is a matter of skill; Mr Clarke, like Mr Blair, is a lawyer and a first-rate dispatch box performer But we also favour Mr Clarke on the basis of his record. Suppose that the worst fears about Labour’s National Health Service review came to pass.