Jobless line up to vote Vulcan

John Redwood is not familiar with turn-outs like this. Used, in his day job, to press conferences which generally attract no more than the quango reporter from the Western Daily Press, he had hired one of the smaller public rooms in the Houses of Parliament to announce his candidacy for the leadership.

It became immediately clear the place was not big enough to accommodate both the queue of journalists snaking its way out of the building and the very large chips carried on the shoulders of the campaign team assembled by the former Secretary of State for Wales. There cannot have been such a gathering of the ditched, the sacked and the jobless like that squeezing in behind Mr Redwood since the last Premier League Managers' Association meeting. Behind the new champion of the right stood the former whipless Tony Marlow wearing a noisy blazer. Norman Lamont sat to the candidate's left (plenty of room there) eulogising the Redwood qualities in a manner reminiscent of his backing for John Major in the last leadership contest. Behind him was Teresa Gorman, arriving late and jostling her way busily into camera shot.

"A brilliant performance," Mr Marlow said afterwards of his new leader's show. As usual, Mr Marlow got it wrong. It was not so much the performance that was admirable - charisma is not Mr Redwood's middle name - as the manner in which he managed to suppress the urge to leap around punching the air in the excitement of it all. An urge which was clearly, if his uncontrolled hand movements were indicative, boiling in his chest. But Teresa Gorman, in all the adrenalin rush, lost the battle for gravitas and grinned like she had just won a planning dispute against her local authority.

The location may have been small, over-heated and unattractive (an architectural metaphor for the Redwood caucus) but it did have symbolic purpose. It was chosen to indicate Mr Redwood was at work in situ, in the Commons, the home of British democracy, while John Major was wasting time with Europe in Cannes. Indeed the immediate response to Mr Redwood's press conference was left, in Mr Major's absence, to Lord Cranbourne, standing on the steps of the Major campaign head-quarters. The name Redwood was absent from a terse statement.

"There is only one man behind whom the whole party can unite and win the next election, and that man is ..." said his Lordship, pausing for dramatic effect. "Tony Blair," yelled a bystander, catching the general mood that the Tories' internecine feud will prove irrelevant come the next general election.

Meanwhile, on the pavement outside Westminster, Mr Redwood's extra-parliamentary fan club had gathered to show solidarity. Philip Ward, its sole member, was holding up a sign reading "Vote Vulcan".

"I don't come from Wales or Wokingham," said Mr Ward. "But I have been following Mr Redwood's career with interest since he came to the Cabinet. He seems to have all the virtues of leadership John Major lacks." But he wasn't a conspicuous success as Welsh Secretary, was he? "That is because he was in the wrong job," said Mr Ward, clearly a believer in the cock-up theory of promotion.

Lest Mr Redwood gets too carried away by this spontaneous show of public endorsement, it should be noted that, on a day when the tarmac was so hot you could have done a Paxman on it (grill a politician), Mr Ward was wearing a fur-lined anorak.