A week from today, Margaret Thatcher will be 80. From 1979 to 1990, she set an example of courage and strong leadership that earned respect and admiration far beyond these islands. Fifteen years after she left Downing Street after an ignominious putsch, her legacy of leadership has been wrested from the Conservative Party by Prime Minister Blair. The party she led to three successive election victories has suffered three consecutive defeats at his hands. Today, the Conservatives are leaderless. And if the speeches by the five candidates at this week’s Conservative Party Conference are anything to go by, it may be some time before they find a leader who can hold a candle to her.

It was significant that not one of the would-be leaders dared to pay a proper tribute to Lady Thatcher, as she now is. Evidently the conventional wisdom in Tory circles these days is that even to mention her name would frighten the voters. Only the oldest contender, Kenneth Clarke, so much as mentioned her – but that will have evoked no more than a wry smile from the lady herself, for he was one of the ministers who plotted most assiduously to bring her down. On the night in December 1990 when she summoned the members of her Cabinet in, one by one, to ask for their support, Mr. Clarke was the one who told her bluntly that she was finished. His was the unkindest cut of all.

What a contrast with Mr. Blair, her lifelong opponent, who frequently invokes the Thatcher name in order to contrast her radicalism with the timorous Tories of today. Of the five Tory aspirants who hope to inherit what is left of her squandered inheritance, none is as bold as Mr. Blair in laying claim to the neoconservative vision of a world in which the antidote to terrorism is democracy. In fact, not one of the contenders spoke about Iraq this week, and two of them – Mr. Clarke and Sir Malcolm Rifkind, former chancellor of the exchequer and foreign secretary, respectively – publicly opposed the war.

True, the other three – David Davis, David Cameron, and Liam Fox – all broadly supported the Blair policy on Iraq. But all three have kept very quiet about it, perhaps hoping that nobody will notice.

Dr. Fox likes to portray himself as an Atlanticist. But he was the party chairman responsible for last May’s disastrous election campaign, in which the Conservatives did their best to distance themselves from the war, mocking the close relationship between President Bush and Mr. Blair in their propaganda. And it was Dr. Fox who personally assured me last December that the rift between the White House and the Conservative leader, Michael Howard, was over. It only took one phone call to Washington to ascertain that this was a lie, and that Mr. Howard was still (and remains to this day) persona non grata with the Bush administration.

As for Mr. Cameron, he gave a decent speech in August to a foreign policy think tank in which he made all the right noises about standing up to the Islamists. So maybe his heart is in the right place. As the youngest and preppiest of the contenders, however, he wants to sound both grown-up and populist. But his way of doing this is to present himself as the Tory version of Mr. Blair, rather than going back to Mrs. Thatcher for inspiration. He is so desperate not to sound conservative that his speech was virtually content free. The only thing most voters associate Mr. Cameron with is the fashionable West London district where he lives: Notting Hill. He seems less the Tony Blair than the Hugh Grant of the Tory Party. And though Mr. Grant may be Hollywood’s idea of an ideal Englishman, a bumbling, floppy-haired fop straight out of P.G. Wodehouse is not exactly going to strike fear into the likes of Osama bin Laden or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Mr. Davis, who was the hot favorite until his lackluster speech yesterday, has no problem looking tough. His drawback is that his rugged features, military bearing, and working-class background make him seem too much of a street fighter. Whereas Mrs. Thatcher’s “Iron Lady” armor was useful in persuading the then intensely masculine world of politics and the media to take her seriously, Mr. Davis badly needs to soften his image. He has quoted President Reagan more than once this week, and he could take a leaf out of the late president’s book. It’s fine to be an unashamed conservative, to say you see nothing wrong in letting people get rich or calling the Soviet Union an evil empire – as long as you can do it with charm. Mr. Davis has about as much charm as Hannibal Lecter.

I hear that Mr. Bush has been reduced by his present bout of unpopularity in the polls to giving speeches insisting that he really is a conservative. Actually, that isn’t very difficult: He just has to keep whispering two words to his disgruntled supporters: “Hillary Clinton.” Here in Britain, this tactic just doesn’t work. The whole problem for the British Tories is that Mr. Blair often sounds like a more authentic conservative than they do.