LONDON — Cocaine, Mistress Pain the dominatrix and tobacco deals in North Korea: The past week has been busy for Britain's Conservative Party.

The Tories are picking a new leader to scrape their venerable party off the pavement after three consecutive electoral drubbings by Tony Blair's Labor Party. The new boss almost certainly will be the party's contender for prime minister in the next general election, taking on Blair's successor, most likely Gordon Brown, chancellor of the exchequer, or Treasury chief.

But what started as a fairly dusty contest dominated by health care and policy toward the European Union (EU) morphed into a decidedly racier contest, highlighting the generational changes that might be remaking a party desperate to regain its lost glory.

Two of the four candidates will be eliminated this week in voting that started yesterday among the 198 Tories in Parliament. In December, the party's 300,000 members nationwide will pick between the final two. While the race is unpredictable, political analysts — and the nation's bet-on-anything bookies — said the ultimate winner could easily be David Cameron, 39, the youngest of the candidates, who seems to have withstood a barrage of questions about his past.

Cameron has repeatedly declined to answer questions about whether he used cocaine while at Oxford University. The drug never before had been a central issue in British politics, but last month the British tabloids published photos of homegrown supermodel Kate Moss snorting cocaine, and the "did-you-ever" question was suddenly in vogue.

The Evening Standard newspaper's reporters swabbed toilets at the recent Labor and Tory annual party conferences and many samples tested positive for cocaine, the paper reported.

When a reporter tried the drug question on Cameron, a product of the elite Eton school, he hedged: "I had a normal university experience, if I can put it like that," he said. Pressed in later interviews, Cameron said he was "allowed to have had a private life before politics" and "we are all human and we err and stray."

Still standing

At the party conference, Cameron delivered a speech universally hailed as exceptional, the coming-out address of a talented young leader from a new generation of Conservatives. By contrast, David Davis, 56, widely considered the preconference favorite, gave a speech panned as dull.

Even after strong speeches by the other two candidates — former Treasury chief Kenneth Clarke, 65, the party's self-described "Big Beast," and Liam Fox, 43 — analysts agreed momentum had shifted to Cameron. "He was clearly confident, charismatic and able," said Jonathan Freedland, a columnist for the Guardian.

Some in the Cameron camp saw the drug story as their rivals' dirty-tricks response to Cameron's strong showing at the conference.

The allegations hit a new level Sunday with publication in the News of the World and the Sunday Mirror newspapers of a 12-year-old photo. It showed George Osborne, 34, a leading Tory member of Parliament and Cameron's campaign manager, sitting with his arm around a prostitute known as Mistress Pain, who alleged in the story that Osborne snorted cocaine.

"The allegations are completely untrue, and dredging up a photo from when I was 22 years old is pretty desperate stuff," Osborne said in a statement. He said the woman was a friend of a friend. "This is merely part of an absurd smear campaign to divert attention from the issues that matter in this leadership contest."

Polls published in recent days show that Cameron's refusal to address the drug-use question has not hurt him and that a majority of Tories thought the issue was irrelevant. Analysts said the image of Cameron being hounded by the tabloid media probably generated sympathy and name recognition.

As Cameron's camp was declaring its storm over Monday, Clarke was hit with a new story. The Guardian published an article detailing how British American Tobacco is producing 2 billion cigarettes a year in North Korea, a Communist nation with one of the world's worst human-rights records. Clarke is the company's deputy chairman, a post in which he makes about $300,000 a year, said company spokeswoman Teresa La Thangue.

She said the company has been operating a factory jointly with a North Korean government-run company, since September 2001. She said Clarke was aware of the deal and officials saw no problem investing in a country with North Korea's rights record: "It's not our place to tell governments how to run their countries."

As things transpired in the first round of voting yesterday, Clarke was eliminated. Davis came out on top with 62 votes, but he had expected four more.

Momentum, instead, appeared to be building for Cameron, who got 56 votes, while Fox came third with 42, narrowly ahead of Clarke with 38.

The three remaining contenders face another elimination ballot tomorrow.

Material from The Associated Press is included in this report.