Gingrich was always going to have trouble among the old, women and Hispanics in Florida, with Romney extravagantly promising to defend Medicare and Medicaid from cuts, Gingrich's ex-wife claiming that he had asked her for an open marriage, and then the news emerging that Gingrich had once, sort of, almost, kind of, implied that Spanish was "the language of the ghetto" (which he quickly denied having done). Yet the conservatives' case against Gingrich    focuses on the moment last April when Rep Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the poster boy of fiscal responsibility, came up with his radical plan to address the budget deficit, which conservatives defended against a hyperbolic attack from the Left, and Gingrich denounced as "right-wing social engineering". Gingrich's albeit tentative embrace of the concept of man-made climate change, which many conservative Republicans routinely describe as a "hoax", and his support of cap-and-trade don't help, nor does the memory of the Republicans' mutiny against his speakership of the House in the 1990s. Worst of all is the $1.6m he earned advising Fannie Mae, which is widely blamed by conservatives as being at least in part responsible for the 2008 crash.

Switch on Morning Joe (NBC), Fareed Zakaria (CNN), the ABC and CBS morning programmes, Bloomberg News and often even the splendidly robust Fox & Friends, therefore, and one sees distinguished Republicans queuing up to denounce Gingrich for his various apostasies against conservatism from the Reagan administration onwards. All White House strategists have to do is sit back and press the "record" button in the unlikely event that he wins the nomination. Indeed, they could do worse than replay his acceptance speech at South Carolina, in which he actually commended Ron Paul for his fiscal ideas (i.e. abolishing the Federal Reserve), and remind America's financially-strapped voters that Gingrich had a $500,000 charge account at Tiffany's.

The next primaries are in Michigan and Arizona, with 30 and 29 delegates respectively. There have already been an almost inconceivable 25 debates, with three more to go, which is also unprecedented in a nomination race. If Gingrich does badly in the next debate in Arizona or in Georgia, Santorum will take on the mantle of the stop-Romney forces. Several key conservative columnists and radio hosts are urging this, in a last-ditch attempt to stop Romney, a man they see — not without reason — as lacking a solid core of conservative beliefs before he spotted the electoral need to adopt them. "Everybody is guilty of some transgression somewhere against conservatism," says Rush Limbaugh, "except Santorum."

The Republican Party has long been a coalition of businessmen, Christians, foreign policy hawks and ideological free-marketeers. Of course it's perfectly possible to be all four at once, indeed many Republicans are, but in this election each of these tendencies has had a different paladin who has made each position his personal fiefdom: Romney speaks for business, Gingrich for the hawks, Santorum for the social and religious conservatives and Paul for the libertarian head-bangers who want to put America back on the gold standard. Sadly, no one speaks, like Ronald Reagan managed to, for all four strands of the party simultaneously, and sounds as though he means it.