The runners may not yet be out of the starting blocks, but the first endorsement has been handed down in the Conservative leadership race.
David James, the City trouble-shooter who helped author the Tory manifesto by providing the £35bn blueprint for Whitehall savings to fund tax cuts, today told the BBC's World at One that if the party has a better candidate than David Davis, "they must be very rich in resources indeed".
Describing the shadow home secretary as a "hugely impressive and very forceful presence", Mr James modestly added: "The future leadership of the Conservative party is not in my hands." However, his backing has certainly fired the starting pistol.
Meanwhile, in today's Times, a newly re-elected ally of Mr Davis, Andrew Mitchell MP, tells the paper the young thirtysomething pretenders, George Osborne and David Cameron, should put a sock in it. Or rather, he uses an analogy from his days as a wine trader: "Someone recently gave me a bottle of Chateau Latour 2000. I think it would be wiser for me to leave it in the bottle for quite a few years yet before I open it, and I would give the same advice to some of the younger leadership contenders."
Finally, for those keeping track, we now have both a non-partisan Conservative leadership blog tracking events in the contest which hasn't started yet, and the first proper "candidate blog" - for Mr Davis - although he presumably has nothing to do with it.
