Tories wet, dry, and historic: Lady T. celebrates 80, while today's pols scramble to lead the party.

London MARGARET THATCHER's 80thbirthday party on the 13th of October was the last great social occasion of Thatcherism. Attended by the Queen and Prince Philip, Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife Cherie, many members of the birthday girl's former cabinets, and almost all the luminaries of what in the 1980s was called "The Great Moving Right Show," it was both a glorious party and probably Lady Thatcher's final appearance as the star of a glamorous London event. (Well, as Lady T. herself might say--she being the possessor of a flinty sense of humor--not quite the last occasion.)

The Queen's presence was significant. Her journey to Downing Street as the guest of Winston Churchill on his last night as prime minister almost exactly 50 years ago was one of few precedents. (And Churchill, unlike Lady Thatcher, was still prime minister when he played host.) Also, the media like to hint that Her Majesty never much liked Thatcherism or its inventor. In addition to doubting this on the general grounds that the Queen is scrupulously careful never to reveal her political preferences (moderate Tory I would guess), I notice that HM has shown Lady Thatcher signal favors since she left office. In particular, she invited her to join the Order of Merit, which is the single greatest distinction the Queen can bestow and reflects, if not her personal regard, then her acknowledgment of the former prime minister's achievements.

From the standpoint of Buck House, of course, prime ministers, however distinguished (or not), come and go. The caravan has now moved on. This was a gracious public farewell. Tony Blair's reflections were presumably more complicated. It was generous of him to be present. Most Labour supporters still dislike Lady Thatcher, and Blair's attendance would only lend credence to their belief that he is Thatcher's bastard heir and a secret Tory. (Yes and No, if you care to know the answer.) But Blair is a social animal who, like Bill Clinton, thinks he can win anyone around. He likes a good party. And, as he has acknowledged, he admires many of the Lady's achievements.

Yet he must also have felt the cold hand of--no, not death, but retirement--on his collar. No prime minister can ever fully adjust to losing office. They instinctively wish to order action when confronted by some problem. They are haunted by what they failed to do. They replay the big decisions in their minds. Having announced in advance that he will retire before the next election, Blair is now conscious that That Day is racing towards him. When he swapped small talk with Lady T., he must have felt that he would soon be in her shoes--though with fewer achievements to his credit and, in all likelihood, many more years of post-prime-ministerial life to reflect on that fact. Or as they say in showbiz: Sic transit Gloria Swanson.

After Blair and the Queen left (in that order, contrary to Emily Post), the party went on in high spirits. Lord Carrington--Mrs. Thatcher's foreign secretary who resigned honorably because he failed to prevent the Argentine takeover of the Falklands--proposed a witty toast: "Travels with Margaret as PM were a nightmare--though nightmare is the wrong word since one never got any sleep." Disdaining her doctors' advice not to make public speeches, Lady Thatcher responded in kind. And then old enemies swapped stories of cabinet battles long ago; economists debated the virtues of monetarism one more time; MPs, current and retired, contrasted the heroine of those days with the pygmies of today ...

Oh yes, that reminds me. When the last piece of sushi had been eaten, and the last flute of champagne drained; when the last guest had departed, and the amber glow of nostalgia finally dissipated, we walked out into the London streets to find that a Tory leadership election was going on. You could tell so from the tabloid headlines- to be precise, the News of the World headline a few days later that read, "Top Tory, Coke and the Hooker."

First, however, the story so far.

In the Tory system for choosing leaders, successive elections confined to the 198 Tory members of Parliament whittle down the contenders to two finalists. These then tour the country for a month, debating before the Tory volunteer faithful who choose the new leader in a nationwide election.

The first ballot on Tuesday, October 18, produced a surprise result--Ken Clarke, the candidate of the old Tory "wet" establishment and a former finance minister, came in fourth and was eliminated. Clarke was far and away the most experienced of the candidates and also the most popular with the public--a genial, jazz-loving, beer-drinking, cigar-smoking, old-style pol who didn't give a damn. But the scale of his defeat--he got only 38 votes--suggests that the Tory party is now Thatcherite on the economy and Europe.

That leaves three candidates who, in ascending order according to the bookies, are:

1. Liam Fox, a tough, direct, and eloquent medical doctor who is probably the most pro-American British politician and who, at the Tory conference, was almost the only speaker to "mention the war"--the Iraq war, that is. He is also an unashamed social conservative in a largely liberal party. With 42 votes in the first round, he is technically the number-two right-winger in the race. But he can label his performance "better than expected" and hope to win votes on the basis of this "Medium Mo."

2. David Davis, the number-one right-winger, is the alpha male in this contest--an orthodox Thatcherite who happens to be the working-class son of a single mother. He made his meritocratic way from a municipal housing estate through school, university, the business world, and Mrs. Thatcher's governments to within a touch of the Tory leadership. He skis, climbs mountains, and reads for fun. And he used to be a weekend member of the famous commando Special Air Service. He finished first in the Tuesday ballot with 62 votes--but that was five fewer than were publicly committed to him.

3. David Cameron is both an old-style Tory "toff" from a good family and the candidate of the "modernizing tendency." He went from university into Tory politics as an adviser to ministers in John Major's government and from there into the Commons. As old-style Tory toffs used to say, "He's never had a proper job." He is thus the least experienced of the candidates and the most difficult to define ideologically. But he is smooth, charming, and bright--and the gods seem to be smiling on him. He was thought to have only about 30 votes in advance. In the event he collected 56.

His advance and Davis's doldrums began at the annual Tory conference. Davis, then the clear front-runner, made a merely competent speech that failed to arouse the assembled Tories and enabled the media to paint it as a failure. Cameron did a Liddy Dole, ignoring the podium, walking around the stage, and dazzling everyone with a relaxed personal talk. No one could remember what he had said, but everyone agreed that it was brilliant. He had, said grown men with straight faces, given them "hope."

That pattern of personality politics has continued since then. Davis tries to talk about tax cuts, Fox about the decline of the family. But since Cameron gains from the vague and inoffensive nature of his "modernizing" theme--and since the media like it--sharp debate on specifics never happens. So something else fills the vacuum, according to a familiar political equation: Campaigning Minus Ideology Equals Scandal.

Cameron began to be dogged by the reports that he has taken drugs in the past. They did not initially hurt him. Almost all young Brits have smoked marijuana at college. Then, cleverly, Clarke denounced the raising of such questions but added that he had never taken cocaine. Cocaine? That raised the stakes. The tabloids set to work and came up with a ten-year-old photograph of another Tory modernizer (Cameron's campaign manager) with his arm around a black prostitute at a table with a small amount of white powder on it. But the poor man's explanation was quite plausible. (He had no idea the woman was a prostitute, she was his friend's girlfriend, he had never taken cocaine, and so on.) Besides he wasn't Cameron who, as Tuesday's vote shows, continued to soar hopefully over these difficulties.

Any final result cannot be firmly predicted. Some votes cast on Tuesday were tactical; there are two ballots to go; and the final electorate is a different animal from the 197 MPs. Still, Cameron's support is rising in the opinion polls as well as at Westminster. Clarke's votes will transfer to him wholesale. And rivalry between Davis and Fox and their respective supporters could finally hand the leadership of a now-Thatcherite party to someone who, insofar as his ideological predilections can be discerned, is culturally hostile to Thatcherism.

A Cameron aide was quoted in the London Times as arguing that their strategy would be deliberately to lose their more right-wing voters in order to "fundamentally change the party" and become more attractive to centrist Liberal Democrats. The mathematics seem dubious--the rock-bottom Tory vote is about a third of the electorate while the Lib-Dems are doing spectacularly well when they get a quarter. More to the point, this strategy would leave the Tories vulnerable to a more formidable threat. In his desperation to leave a legacy, Blair is now advancing reforms of health and education that imitate Thatcherite ideas of private provision and market solutions in the public sector. It is an odd time for the Tories to elect a non-Thatcherite leader with an anti-Thatcherite strategy.

Maybe Blair's presence at Lady T.'s bash was not simple generosity, after all. He was wooing a new constituency.