In his latest column, PopCon Director, Mark Littlewood, says fortune favours the brave and he hopes all four leadership candidates put forward some genuinely bold and imaginative ideas at the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham. 

Inch by inch we are moving closer to electing a new leader. All four of those who remain in the race can claim they have a realistic pathway to victory.

Of course, we face a couple more rounds of Parliamentary voting before the final two candidates go forward to the party membership. But the leadership contest will move into a new phase with Robert, Kemi, Tom and James parading their wares at the party conference in Birmingham. Whilst they will have one eye on attempting to win over their Parliamentary colleagues, they may conclude that the best way to do so is to make a positive impression on the gathered party activists.

The conventional wisdom is that when we get to the last two candidates, the party membership will plump for the one considered to be the more "right wing".

I'm not sure this is entirely true. My guess is that the members will go for whoever is the most radical in their strategy to revive the party's fortunes. So far, the leadership contest has been good-spirited and informative but perhaps rather too "safe".

If we are serious about returning to office in five years' time we will need a paradigm shift in both our policy platform and our organisational structure. Good management, hard work and discipline are all necessary in order to win the next election but they won't be sufficient.

Rigorously opposing the increasingly frequent missteps by the Labour government looks like it might be an exercise in shooting fish in a barrel but, again, I suspect that won't be enough to secure a Conservative victory in 2029.

I'm looking forward to seeing which candidates can put together a coherent vision rather than a series of retail policy proposals. The PopCon proposition is that we need to completely reimagine the ways in which the state functions. A swathe of quangos and arm’s length bodies will need to be abolished or brought to heel and a restoration of Parliamentary democracy is desperately needed.

We lost two thirds of our MPs at the last election but we have also lost about two thirds of our membership since the turn of the millennium. A serious plan to reinvigorate and empower the grassroots is a prerequisite to achieving future electoral success.

Finally, politicians need to be honest with the electorate about the parlous and unsustainable state of the public finances. If we are going to oppose spending reductions in certain areas - such as the winter fuel allowance - we need to be crystal clear where we will make savings elsewhere. A serious reduction in state expenditure is a necessity and this is not so much an ideological point as a basic fact of maths. If we don't face up to this then the next Conservative government may end up being little more than an exercise in crisis management.

Fortune favours the brave and I hope all four leadership candidates put forward some genuinely bold and imaginative ideas when we meet in Birmingham at the end of the month.

Keep the flag of freedom flying high.