(CNSNews.com) - The contest to lead Britain's Conservative Party -- languishing in opposition for eight years -- is edging towards a classic right-left race, after party lawmakers voted out former finance minister Ken Clarke in a first round of voting.

For Conservatives who have been defeated by Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labor Party in three successive elections, the choice of leader to take the party into the next election is crucial.

Outgoing leader Michael Howard resigned after a poor showing in an election last May, when the conservatives took just 32 percent of the vote.

Opinion polls have shown Clarke -- a "One Nation" (socially-liberal) Conservative who supports closer economic ties with the European Union -- to be by far the most popular of contenders for the leadership among Britons all parties.

But most of the party's 198 lawmakers voting on Tuesday thought differently, and the 65-year-old veteran politician secured just 38 votes.

Clarke's departure leaves three in the running -- conservative David Davis, who won 62 votes in the first round; centrist David Cameron, who polled 56; and Liam Fox, another conservative, who received 42 votes.

Analysts now expect Clarke's liberal backers to shift their support to the centrist Cameron.

The Davis and Fox camps were quick to claim that their man stood the best chance of defeating Cameron from the right, setting the stage for stepped-up public lobbying - and possibly back-room dealing - in the hours until Thursday's second-round vote.

Conservative lawmakers voting on Thursday evening will eliminate one of the three, and then the party's full membership of 300,000 will vote in a postal ballot to choose a leader from the remaining two candidates. The final result will be announced around Dec. 6.

With Cameron expected to be the main beneficiary from Clarke's elimination, most predictions are for a Cameron-Davis or Cameron-Fox runoff.

Cameron, 39, offers little parliamentary experience but has captured attention with calls for the party to modernize if it is to appeal to the election-winning center-ground of British politics.

An opinion poll taken after the leadership hopefuls delivered speeches at the party's annual conference early this month showed Cameron, the party's education spokesman, had done better than all of his rivals.

In his speech, Cameron called for the Conservatives to embrace change if they were to avoid a fourth consecutive election defeat, warning that a move to the right would turn the party into a "fringe group." The speech brought a three-minute ovation from party members.

Davis and Fox carry the hopes of the "euro-skeptic" (skeptical of the E.U.) and right wing of the party.

Fox, 43, is a Catholic physician with strong pro-life views, who serves as the Conservatives' foreign affairs spokesman. He is keen to restore his party's close links with the Republican Party, strained during the Howard leadership because of differences over Iraq.

Davis, 56, is a strong conservative with working-class roots who holds the party's home affairs portfolio.

He went into the race as front-runner but his showing in the first-round ballot was a disappointment: Davis ended up winning the support of four or five fewer lawmakers than he had said were understood to be supporting him.

In some ways, the leadership race has echoes of the July 1994 contest to lead the Labor Party.

Like the Conservatives now, Labor at the time had been in opposition for many years and faced the choice of a young leader with modern ideas -- a 40-year-old Tony Blair -- and the more traditional alternative of the older John Prescott, a left-wing former unionist.

Blair won the leadership race, moved his "New Labor" towards the center and led it to a landslide election victory three years later.

Supporters of Cameron have described their candidate as the Conservative Party's version of Blair, capable of rebranding the party and capturing the center-ground from Labor. Fox backers have also compared their contender to Blair.

Since former Prime Minister John Major lost the 1997 election to Labor, the Conservatives have gone through three leaders -- William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Howard - and lost elections in 2001 and 2005.

Whoever replaces Howard will not likely face Blair in the next election, due to be held by June 2010 at the latest. The prime minister is expected to hand over Labor leadership at some point before then, probably to Chancellor (finance minister) Gordon Brown.

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