The one-man roadshow

Silently, the door at the side of the stage opens. In walks Michael Howard and the room falls quiet. He doesn't acknowledge anyone, there's no cough, no friendly opening remarks. Looking straight ahead, he launches into his message to the "peepil". Within a minute he's mentioned "families"; seconds later he refers to "hard-working Britons". The pace is fast but steady. There are no peaks and troughs, no highs and lows to hit the senses.

Standing on Mr Howard's left, Oliver Letwin fixes his gaze on his leader. The shadow chancellor is shorter than Mr Howard, who is a tall man. Mr Letwin is plumper, too, and younger. The contrast between them exaggerates Mr Howard's isolation. That picture isn't helped by the fact that the press conference is by no means full. Alongside the journalists sit party apparatchiks - there, you suspect, to make the place feel more crowded than it really is.

The session started late because Labour's was already in full swing. Halfway through Mr Howard's lawyerly monologue, in an unsubtle indication as to who comes first, some heavyweight broadcasters make their entrance, having hot-footed it from Millbank.

At the back, behind the cameras, Maurice Saatchi stands, surveying the scene. There's a well-known saying in public relations that you should never put yourself between the client and the footlights. For once, it wouldn't be so bad if the Tories broke this rule, if a businessman of true stature, with charm and wit, shared the platform with the lonely Mr Howard.

It's not to be. Occasionally, the Tory leader defers to Mr Letwin and when he does, the throng look down, leafing through their papers. They're not interested in the shadow chancellor, who, while clever, comes across as bumbling. Mr Letwin's answers to questions are windy and inevitably tail-off. His leader finishes them with a crisp ending - a move that only serves to emphasise the gulf in class between them. It's Howard who counts; Howard who the campaign workers, including Rachel Whetstone, his lissom speech writer leaning against one wall, are focused on; Howard who the country will be asked to decide upon.

For weeks now it's been like this. Down the road is Tony Blair, spray-tanned, shoulder to shoulder with his iron Chancellor. Here is Mr Howard, pale, and on his own. A senior Tory official tells me it's been a "pretty good week for Michael". Well, if you count still trailing woefully in the polls, going too far on immigration so that even those on your own team question your very sanity, not delivering the income-tax cuts that many of your followers expect, and failing to acquire the support of the country's best-selling newspaper, as helpful, then yes, it's been an okay week.

Mr Howard's whole career, however, has been built on arriving late, of being written off and coming good. The last of his contemporaries at Cambridge to get a seat, overcoming latent prejudice against his Jewishness, married to the glamorous Sandra when well into his thirties, bottom in the leadership election of 1997 but elected unopposed six years later, he has regularly played the dark horse stealing up the rails. This, though, must be one race even he cannot win.

It's not through dint of trying. He's 63 but has the vim of someone much younger. He may be whizzing everywhere on a helicopter or in his coach (the battle bus has been dropped, because, said one aide, "there were too many leaks and not enough control on board"), but his schedule is neverthless punishing.

The pressure, even with his wife to accompany him - and she is appearing tired at this, the end of the second week - is unrelenting. He knows and they know, all the watchers in this room and elsewhere, that one slip, one unguarded moment, and he could be toast.

Every meal is wolfed down, every drink is gulped, and everywhere he goes there's a KitKat bar to sustain him (he insists on there always being one available). He's helped, of course, by his razor mind. By now a lesser person would have stumbled, would have done a Charlie Kennedy and floundered on the simplest of questions, but Mr Howard has never lost it, not ever, not in public, anyway.

BEHIND the scenes, things are different. There, he raged ag ainst Howard Flight, before and after sacking him, and more than one helper has been on the end of his temper.

His intellect is what has got him this far and it's not letting him down now, in this, his most demanding time. Always a brilliant debater, he can trade blows with the most accomplished interrogator. Only once has he suffered a mauling and that was when Jeremy Paxman asked him the same question 13 times and he failed to answer (his admirers maintain far from a going over, it was evidence of his natural obduracy). Last week, in Kettering, he imitated the soapbox tactic of the more streetwise John Major and challenged all-comers. The result was a roasting for one hapless Labour heckler.

He isn't, and never has been, a compelling orator. Neither is Blair, but his main adversary can tap into emotions, even in a sometimes forced way, that Mr Howard simply cannot. This gets to the heart of Mr Howard's weakness. In private, he's smart and good company. Across the dispatch box, too, his humour and passion shine through. But put him in front of a microphone, before a large throng and he lacks the "It factor". Against his unashamedly tear-jerking Labour opponent he can seem stiff.

As the new Pope has shown, such a limitation need not be terminal. But allied to this handicap are other factors that count against him. He likes to take decisions himself, without deferring to others. He personally overruled putting up the incometax threshold in case it was spun as the Tories favouring the rich. Likewise, he was the one who put immigration centre stage.

He isn't a great delegator - although to be fair, he isn't exactly blessed with an array of talent to turn to. When he snaps, as he did over Flight, he takes the decision there and then. A more calculating politician, while wishing to be seen to exert discipline, might have waited, for fear of upsetting other MPs who smoulder at the heavy-handed punishment of one of their own for a small slip.

With Flight and other episodes in the election battle, it has been difficult to gauge Mr Howard's actual strategy. He talks about fairness and then acts unfairly. He knocks Labour and invites voters to do the same, but denies he is seeking a protest vote.

The Blair camp believes that in the end, this will prove Mr Howard's undoing. That, for all his cut and thrust, he remains a tactician and not a strategist, an attack dog and not a genuine commander, a short-term grabber of opportunities as opposed to a careful long-term planner. This election is midway and there's precious little evidence of a Howard bandwagon developing. He's leading from the front all right - but he couldn't half do with some people behind him.