Steve Richards: And now, some less than dire news for miserable Tories (no, really)

The Conservatives have stopped enjoying themselves. In the weeks following the election they were having a ball and, as an added bonus, were preening themselves with a sense of their own importance. After all, they had a glamorous, attention-grabbing leadership contest to fight while the other lot faced the more tedious task of governing.

Now their mood has darkened. The main supporters of the two leadership candidates are subdued. I detect no excitement in either camp as the battle reaches its climax. The novelty of media attention has worn off, and the more intelligent Conservatives are only too aware that whoever wins might face four or five years of hell relieved by another humiliating election defeat. Such a prospect hardly gets the champagne corks popping.

The contest itself adds to their deepening gloom. In its bitterness the conflict has been compared with Labour's deputy leadership campaign in 1981. Yet on one level it has been very different from that momentous battle of 20 years ago. This one has been curiously devoid of content.

The overriding question in the first phase of the battle seemed to be "What is Portillo all about?" The answer was: "We don't know, but we don't like it. No, we don't like what we don't know." In this final phase there have been ugly exchanges over race. Yet both candidates agreed that racists had no place in their party and should be expelled. There was also a "row" about whether the party should appeal to women. Shock! Horror! Both candidates agreed that the party should appeal to women. Even more controversially there was some consensus that it might be a good idea to attract young voters in their twenties and thirties.

Then there has been the shambolic organisation of the contest. This must be the first campaign in history that got under way once many of the votes had been cast. The Monty Pythonesque sequence has been as follows: the candidates agreed a two-week truce and went on holiday; on their return the ballot papers were distributed and many votes were cast immediately; at which point the candidates started to campaign. Not even the Liberals at their most determinedly amateurish organised a contest in which the campaign peaked once the voters had already had their say.

So with heads bowed down, senior Conservatives contemplate the possibility of their party dying in front of their eyes. Some even envisage a situation in which the Liberal Democrats could become the main opposition party, with New Labour replacing the Conservatives as the party of the centre right.

This is all very bizarre. Immediately after the election the Conservatives were on an irrational high. But now some of them are sinking into irrational gloom. There are a thousand columns to be written on the question of whether New Labour could ever really be a party of the centre right. I will probably write several hundred of them myself. Come to think of it, I probably already have. But let us put that question to one side for now. Whatever Labour does, the Conservatives, for all their difficulties, are not about to die.

Paradoxically, the Conservatives' near-fatal weakness now will save them at some point. For what is striking about the current Conservative Party is not just the emptiness at the heart of the leadership contest, but a ghostly quality that permeates the entire institution. Who, for example, are the 300,000-odd party members who have a vote in the contest? No one seems to know. It is as if they do not exist. The organisation at the centre also barely exists. No one knows, for example, who will be speaking in what debate at next month's party conference in Blackpool. The current Shadow Cabinet will not be the front-bench team that heads for the seaside resort. Again it is as if the current shadow cabinet does not exist, and of course it almost does not.

This is an awful situation for a party to be in, but not as bad as the state of the Labour Party in the early 1980s. Memories are short in politics and many have concluded that the Conservatives are in a much worse position now than Labour was in then. But in 1983 Neil Kinnock inherited a party that was split over all the main issues of the day, with titanic, charismatic figures on either side of the divide: nuclear disarmament, membership of the Common Market, public ownership, internal organisation of the party. You name it, a blazing row was guaranteed. On every issue, Kinnock was required to change the policy, once he had conducted a traumatic U-turn in his own mind. At the same time he faced the SDP, which in the 1983 election had won almost as many votes as Labour itself.

Compared with such an inheritance the new leader of the Conservative Party is laughing. Apart from Europe he is presented with a blank canvas on which he can paint whatever picture he chooses. Battles are not looming over every key policy area. Partly because of the SDP's failure it is unlikely that a new leader will face a formal schism. Senior Clarkeites insist that they will not go off and form their own party if Duncan Smith wins – not out of tribal loyalty, but because the SDP demonstrated that new parties cannot survive in Britain's political system.

Europe, of course, could finish the party off. But in varying ways both candidates have spoken of "the right to differ" over this issue. It need not necessarily prove fatal. Kinnock faced five or six issues that could have finished off Labour.

In the meantime the Conservatives, having secured a higher percentage of the vote at the last election than Labour won in 1983, face a government that has not challenged every belief they previously held. This is what Thatcher had done to Labour in the 1980s. She did not stride on to Labour's terrain, but forced her opponents to move off it. In contrast the current government has vindicated some of the Conservatives' most deeply held views by adopting similar policies. This makes life difficult, but not as nightmarish as having to reconsider every conviction. What is more, there are signs that the new Conservative leader will face his trauma with the support of some powerful newspapers, an experience unknown to Kinnock (look out for The Sun wooing Duncan Smith and Tony Blair simultaneously).

The current situation is undoubtedly dire for the Conservatives. But it is nowhere near as dire as it was for Labour in the 1980s. An imaginative leader could yet preside over the strange rebirth of his party.