As Intergovernmental Affairs Minister in the Mulroney government, Clark oversaw the travelling circus that begat the Charlottetown accord; as Mulroney's chief of staff, with special responsibility for the constitutional dossier, Segal was the gifted political strategist charged with pushing the accord through to ratification. It was in the flaming wreckage of the referendum, thanks as much to the incoherence of the accord itself as to the incompetence of its proponents, that the party's electoral fate was set.

Politicos to their boots, each has drawn the appropriate political lesson from the disaster: it's not whether you win or lose, but where you place the blame.

Segal spends page after page of his memoirs, No Surrender, ripping into Clark for his aimless handling of the negotiations. For his part, Clark prefers to fault the people, for which the apparent corrective was a stiff post- referendum lecture entitled A Nation Too Good to Lose.

If there is a history of antipathy between the two men, there is much they have in common. As lifelong partisans, their loyalty to the political class is unflinching, their reflexive disdain for the public (an occupational hazard) having long ago hardened into a shared conviction that the country can be held together only by the heroic acts of statesmen - statesmen very much like themselves.

Each is somewhat at war with his public image. Clark, for all his calculated self-effacement, harbours an immense self-regard. Segal, the soul of civility on TV, draws upon the purest streams of bile in his writings, lengthy catalogues of invective aimed at his favourite hates: Trudeau, the neo-cons, and, less passionately but more contemptuously, Clark.

The similarities do not end there. Each abides in that bluff Tory incomprehension of Quebec nationalism, a constitutional policy that mixes effusions of Rotary-Club sentiment with the sort of appeasement-minded naivety that emerges in moments like the 1991 Tory policy convention, when delegates rapturously voted to affirm Quebec's absolute and unfettered right to secede.

Each hews unswervingly to the dogma of pragmatism, though Clark's is the more genuine: he truly doesn't have a political philosophy, whereas Segal merely adjusts his to the demands of partisanship. In this he is the truer son of Dalton Camp, whose latter-day leftism, I am convinced, is purely a tactical feint - in proof of which I offer his warm endorsement, when there was talk of such things, of Ralph Klein for party leader.

In all, it should be a nasty race. If there is one unfailing rule in politics, it is this: the narrower the differences in ideology, the greater the personal enmity. There is no one who hates the Liberals so much as a Red Tory - and no one who hates a Red Tory so much as a fellow Red Tory.

Segal, for all his rants against the Reform Party and its "barbed-wire selfishness," is running on a platform that looks remarkably like Reform's: tax cuts, devolution and democratic reform. As for Clark, we shall have to wait and see. For now we have only his professed willingness to spend less time with his family.

Neither, however, seems ready to offer a convincing answer to the most basic question of all: What is the point? Why does Canada need the Conservative party? Expect to hear countless invocations from either camp of the Tories as the only "national" alternative to the Liberals. But just as Tory policy has for years denied that Canada is a nation - ever since the Stanfield-era "deux nations" gambit - so there is no longer really a national Tory party: only a tenuous cluster of mutually incompatible regional groupings, the shards left by the shattering of the Mulroney coalition.

The strength of either candidate, indeed, is precisely his regional appeal.

The Tories cannot hope to rebuild as a broad-based national party. If nothing else, their near-total extinction in the West has seen to that. The best they can do, at least in the short term, is consolidate their support in some regional base: either Ontario, where Segal's strength lies, or Quebec, where Clark retains some lingering goodwill.

From either redoubt, the Tory rump might eventually force Reform to come to terms - not in a merger, but a territorial alliance that would preserve the two parties' separate identities. Of the two, the Clark-Quebec strategy would seem more promising. Reform's brand name may not sell well in Ontario, but it is simply toxic in Quebec. If and when the Bloc Quebecois collapses, a Clark-led Conservative party would be best placed to pick up the anti- Liberal vote.

An alliance of Western populists and Quebec nationalists. Funny, seems we've been there before.