The Diana of politics will triumph with sympathy vote

MICHAEL PORTILLO, having declared his candidacy, will off all rivals for the leadership the Conservative Party. I can this with confidence because Portillo, in the four years he lost his Enfield seat, has devoted his energies to grooming himself as the first truly modern man of the people.

Just as Diana was the ple's Princess, Michael Portillo has transmogrified into the People's Politician.

Never has a long dark night of the soul been carefully laid out for public inspection, that first brave jutting of the jaw at the Enfield count in 1997, where Mr Portillo swallowed disappointment with what he later described the Castilian pride of his Spanish ancestors. defeat was comparable to the conversion Paul from an arrogant mercantilist into embodiment of charity and humility - except Mr Portillo eschewed the road to Damascus favour of the famous pilgrim route to the tomb St James at Santiago de Compostela.

"I sleep on a simple iron bedstead, with crucifix for company," wrote today's contender for the Tory leadership. He walks over hills companions who have responded to the challenge. "There are things they want to behind, and things they want to know about selves," he wrote afterwards. By the time reaches the Holy Door of Santiago's cathedral, puts his arms around the statue of St James, doesn't want the experience to end, and is "apprehensive about returning to 'real life'".

Back, reluctantly, in the real world, Mr Portillo made TV programmes and gave newspaper interviews about his quest for a new beginning. "You don't really know yourself until you've had to cope with things going wrong," he wrote in the Sunday Express.

He told the Mail on Sunday: "The lows have been very important for me.

Passing through adversity and out through the other side is a very interesting experience."

A Portillo fan club has grown up on the internet (admittedly focusing on his hair).

"I've had the opportunity to show different sides of myself," he told the Sunday Times.

The remodelling began, of course, with Michael Portillo's celebrated speech at the 1997 Conservative Party conference, at which, to the bewilderment of true believers, he made a passionate speech in favour of compassionate Conservatism - the duty of government to help relieve poverty and put people in a position where they could become self-sufficient. After his pilgrimage he broke bread with the humble, wheeling trolley down the corridors of an NHS hospital. At the same time he outed himself as someone who "had some homosexual experiences as a young person", thus preparing himself for victimisation at the hands of Tory stalwarts such as Lord Tebbit.

What, I think, he learned from Princess Diana, was the importance of looking vulnerable. She had a transparency which mesmerised people: she could carry out public functions while making it obvious that beneath the smile and coiffed hair lay depths of self-doubt and suffering. This was what made her the people's princess everybody could feel a sympathy with her which was peculiarly their own.

We are living in an age when public figures are judged more by the emotions they show than by the arguments they make, an age when emotional intelligence counts for more than the exercise of logic. The true heroes of 21st-century Britain are victims - of bad parenting, of poverty, of unforeseen accidents or an over-mighty state and people who can cast themselves as victims in the eyes of the public win a sympathy not extended to the grey ranks of those in authority who keep their feelings to themselves. That is why Michael Portillo is ever more the darling of the Tory constituency, especially the women. Unlike any other front-rank Tory he has learned the art of showing his emotions - and if his emotions are seen as authentic then it follows that his deeds must be too.

That demeanour of anguished mystery, that troubled look in the eyes, is manna to the faithful. That trip to Morocco, to wander silent among the ruins of Volubilis while consulting his inmost thoughts, is all part of the mystique (only slightly spoiled by being spotted dancing madly at a rave-up).

Had he visited India, there would certainly have been a photo- opportunity of him sitting alone and pensive on a bench in front of the Taj Mahal.

Will the country take him to their hearts? think they already have.

Michael Portillo, Hamlet-like in his indecision, his eloquent quest for self-knowledge, is in a different league from the likes of William Hague or Iain Duncan Smith, or even Kenneth Clarke. He is a man struggling with inner demons, and they won't disappear until he has wrapped up the job which might yet take him to 10 Downing Street.

Copyright 2001
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