CONFUSION reigns - not just about when Mr Major will call the general election, but about who'll be directing his party's campaign when he does. To regular readers this will hardly come as any great surprise. There are, after all, a mere 11 weeks at most to polling day. The Tories have been a shambles for most of this parliament. Why change such well established habits at this late stage? And the shambles certainly continues.
Over lunch last week I asked one of Mr Major's aides about Mr Stephen Dorrell's designation for a pre eminent role in the election battle. Notwithstanding the current (sorry, then) received wisdom that the Health Secretary might be a good bet for the eventual succession, his elevation seemed unlikely to prove the answer to the Prime Minister's prayers.
Mr Dorrell certainly comes across to some as a rather doleful figure. A snap survey of friends and colleagues found a general consensus that he appears cold and uncharismatic.
But the PM's man was clear he was a good campaigner who would cut a voter friendly figure.
The Tories plainly have need of such. Come the election proper, Mr Major can hardly conduct all the daily press conferences himself. Michael Heseltine can still turn in a polished performance but perhaps doesn't strike quite the right balance against the youthful Mr Blair.
The Conservative Party Chairman, Dr Brian Mawhinney, may excel in the organisational field but he is not at his best in front of the cameras. So Mr Dorrell was set to shine, carrying the fight to Labour on the constitutional issues by which Mr Major places such store.
Alas by Monday Mr Dorrell had carried a cabinet split - or at least the appearance of it - to Mr Major's own door. In his capacity as spokesman on the constitution, the Health Secretary told the Scotsman that a Scottish parliament was "not something a later Conservative government could leave unchanged."
After tackling the famous "West Lothian question" Mr Dorrell was asked if a better way to preserve the Union would be to get rid of a Scottish parliament, and he replied: "Yes, absolutely."
On the face of it this was not exactly heretical. The Tories have painted the prospect of a tax raising parliament in Edinburgh in apocalyptic terms. Mr Major accuses Labour of opening the way to confrontation with Westminster and eventual Scottish independence.
That being so, many Tory, unionists may think abolition a more straightforward course than the reduction of Scottish representation in London, or cuts in per capita spending north of the border.
But Mr Dorrell was swiftly damned on a number of counts. First, he opened himself and the Tories to the charge of arrogance with an apparent threat to over turn a decision of the Scottish people (courtesy of Mr Blair's promised referendum).
Second, as a member of the sitting government, he committed a grave sin by allowing the possibility that Labour might win the election.
Most crucially of all, he cut clean across the well honed strategy of the Scottish Secretary, Michael Forsythe, who has so successfully carried the devolution battle, to Labour and put Mr Blair to flight on the issue of the tartan tax".
For Mr Forsyth has consistently told the Scottish people their choice for a devolved parliament would prove irreversible with repeal a fantasy.
If he was furious with his colleague, Mr Forsyth kept it well concealed. Not at all, he maintained, he was glad of friend Stephen's intervention - high "time people understood this was an issue for the English as well as for the Scots. But an admirer of the Scottish Secretary says "he must have been livid."
And he explains: "Dorrell has blunted the attack on Labour by suggesting that, if people don't like it (the Scottish parliament) they can always change their minds. In other words, people will think if we can eventually be rid of it, why not experiment?"
Critically, he says, Mr Forsyth is now open to charge "that he is not being honest with the people about the Conservative Party's intentions."
And he fears the row has exposed the Tories "to the contradictions in our own position on the West Belfast question."
West Lothian - to which Mr Blair has framed no satisfactory response - asks why a disproportionate number of Scots MPs should be allowed to vote on issues such as Health and Education in England, when English MPs would no longer be allowed to vote on similar issues in future the preserve of the Scottish parliament.
"New Labour" hasn't hesitated to point to the government's proposals for an assembly in Northern Ireland with legislative and administrative functions. And the Tory source asks: "Why should David Trimble be able to vote on Health in England, when the Member for Huntingdon can't on the same issue for Northern Ireland?"
The MP for Huntingdon this week faced a more pressing question. And he resolved it by announcing that Mr Dorrell had never been appointed as a spokesman on the constitutional issue in the first place.
Mr Major found himself criticised in turn for poor party management, and for confusing his strategy for cabinet survival with that for winning the election. Funny thing, but some cynics had a similar sort of explanation for Mr Dorrell's behaviour.
But it can hardly be true that Mr Dorrell - like Mr Howard, Mr Redwood and Mr Portillo - is more than a little preoccupied with the leadership campaign that would surely follow defeat.
Can it?