As the Conservative Party scrambles, post-defeat, to fashion a future without the leader that defined it for nearly a decade, its moderate, Red Tory wing is maneuvering to reconstitute the party as a centrist, national force that re-brands the Conservative label after years of what they describe as Stephen Harper’s toxic leadership.

On Nov. 5, former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney will deliver a speech at Toronto’s Albany Club in which he is expected to make a case for post-Harper soul searching, which, as the party’s internal factions mobilize for control, translates as enough time to prevent the Reform wing of the party from taking over.

“Before they choose a leader, they need to have a conversation about the soul of the party, and he’s the one to do that,” said a source close to the former prime minister. “How does the party make its way back to the centre?”

Or, as one Red Tory sage said of the speech, “It’ll be a great moment in sports.”

Former aide to Mulroney and, more recently, Conservative MP for Calgary Centre Lee Richardson confirmed that the Liberal Party’s stunning election results Oct. 19 after a remarkably tactical and miscalculated Conservative campaign included the votes of many senior pre-Harperite Tories who’ve voted reliably blue all their adult lives.

“The Liberals were the preferred alternative of Progressive Conservatives,” said Richardson.

As the party begins the transition process toward a leadership campaign and convention, Harper loyalist Diane Finley, the out-going public works minister, has declared a bid to be interim Conservative leader as that process unfolds. Finley and other Harper ministers, including presumed leadership candidate Jason Kenney, have acknowledged the need for a change in tone after a campaign whose inflammatory rhetoric sealed Harper’s fate with Canadian voters.

But moderate Tories are seeking a cleaner break from the Harper legacy, fearing, as one said, “that the Harper-Reform side want to move quickly, get control of he party apparatus, including fundraising and staffing, to assure Reform continuity.”

If the party does not swing back toward the centre, some warn, it will be reduced to a right-wing rump electorally. What is not entirely clear yet is where the party can stake out policy territory closer to the moderate middle that hasn’t already been claimed by Prime Minister-designate Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party, other than the “fiscal responsibility” mantra of the Harper years.

“We need to show a difference in tone and style,” says Harper 2006 campaign co-director and Progressive Conservative alumnus Philippe Gervais. “On policy, we need to renew ourselves.”

In a conservative political culture that lived through the Diefenbaker-Stanfield wars of the 60s and the Clark-Mulroney wars of the late 70s and early 80s, Gervais says he isn’t worried that soul searching will degenerate into knife-throwing.

“If we weren’t fighting, I’d be worried,” he quipped, adding seriously that the process of often fractious post-loss stock-taking is a healthy one for any party.

The Mulroney Tories have long felt alienated from Harper’s Conservative Party, and the feeling was evidently mutual. As Michael Harris wrote in a recent iPolitics piece, the divide was partly East-West, with Harper having brought a brain trust and a cadre of loyal MPs with him from Alberta, displacing the Montreal-Toronto power axis of the Mulroney years.

(Full disclosure: I worked for Mulroney as a press assistant during the 1984 election campaign and in PMO, when I was 21)

The breach was also generational, with the arrival in Harper’s Ottawa of a breed of young Conservative political operatives weaned on Fox News and hooked online into the more polarized battlefields of U.S. politics. The Red Tories blame their brand of highly tactical politics, which was evident during the campaign in both the operational intrigue revealed during the Mike Duffy trial and the cultural fear-triggering of the niqab debate, for Harper’s defeat.

“I was livid,” said Gervais, of watching the 2015 campaign unfold. He blames the acute need for re-branding, as many have, on Harper’s post-2011 political advisers.

“They had almost a Stalinistic way of looking at things,” Gervais, now vice president of The Capital Hill Group, marvelled. “You were either on-side, or you were dead.”

In a piece for Policy Magazine being published Nov. 7, Geoff Norquay, who served as an advisor to Mulroney, then as communications director for Harper in 2003-04 and spent years defending his government on CBC panels and elsewhere, delivers a scathing indictment of Harper’s campaign organization, reserving particularly pointed criticism for campaign manager, Jenni Byrne and her “acolytes.”

“Theirs was a suspicious Canada and a Canada without dreams; they always preferred short-term tactics over a long-term vision,” Norquay writes. “They never understood governing, so they saw no use for government. They ran a closed circle, they humiliated staff, they berated candidates, they pushed every reasonable argument far beyond its logical limit, they shut out others with a different view, and they crafted a campaign based much more on anger and fear than hope. And they weren’t even competent enough to prevent guys peeing in cups from becoming candidates.

“Within the Conservative Party, great will be the celebration at their well-deserved and permanent riddance.”

What the division between the two factions is not — at least not primarily — is ideological. Sources describing the past ten years of interaction between the two wings of the party attribute the tension more to differences in political culture and style than to a gap on the political spectrum of conservative belief.

“They were just mean, nasty people,” said long-time Mulroney policy advisor Charley McMillan. “I don’t think it was a left-right thing.”

McMillan, a York University economics professor who was part of Mulroney’s inner circle, once told biographer L. Ian MacDonald in a hotel-room interview for his book on Mulroney, “Brian’s about as ideological as that coffee pot.”

Norquay told iPolitics the merging of the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives actually started out well because “both sides recognized that being apart was not going to work” electorally and because Harper also was not, at heart, an ideologue.

“In philosophical terms, Harper was always a moderate and a centrist. His personal interest was in putting the hot-button cultural issues — abortion, same-sex marriage — aside because the got in the way of winning.”

After the campaign Harper just ran, Norquay says, a significant part of that coalition between the old PCs and Alliance supporters that was already strained over issues such as the 2011 Robocalls scandal, the PMO’s personal targeting of Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin and the government’s repeated challenges to the Charter of Rights has “shattered”.

Norquay and others applauded the high-road campaign Trudeau ran and the cohesiveness of his team. Many cited the same low point in the Conservative campaign as evidence that the Harper era needed to end for the sake of the country: the paranoid hyperbole of the “Barbaric Cultural Practices Tip Line,” which made the Harper government sound like John Cleese answering the phone in a Monty Python skit, and which many see as a potentially disqualifying moment for rumoured leadership hopeful Kellie Leitch.

“It was way over the line,” said former senator and Red Tory stalwart Hugh Segal. “It’s not who we are.”

Segal has suggested a two-year timeline for the party to choose a leader, enough time for the party to examine the mistakes of the past decade and re-orient itself based on ideas, not through an early leadership campaign that could further fracture a wounded organization.

“We need to hold up a mirror and ask who we are and why we’re here,” he said, acknowledging that inevitable political pressures may make that timeline highly aspirational. A one-year transition process leading to a leadership convention in Sept. 2016 seemed the more popular option.

As to who might best represent a change of image, shift the party to the centre and unite it nationally, the well-liked and well-respected Lisa Raitt comes up as an option, with an asterisk on whether her French is sufficiently fluent. At a time when authenticity is at a political premium, Raitt’s lack of artifice of Cape Breton-bred sense of humour are cited as excellent selling points. She is seen as being from but not of the Harper government.

The Globe and Mail reported Monday that former foreign affairs minister John Baird is seriously considering a leadership run. Baird promptly dispelled the story in a statement, saying he is “extremely happy” in his post-political life.

There’s a general wistfulness that former Progressive Conservative cabinet minister and former Liberal Premier Jean Charest, now a partner at the Montreal law firm of McCarthy Tétrault, has already shot down the suggestion of a run.

“He likes the attention but he’s making a million dollars a year,” said one Tory source.

Whether or not Charest’s “no” was final, the notion of having a former Liberal premier lead the Conservative Party Stephen Harper has left behind may sound like a Red Tory fantasy, given the power a candidate like Kenney could wield in any leadership contest.

“My feeling is that Jason could be king-maker,” said one veteran PC source of the support Kenney could garner from the party’s current Harperite base, “but he’ll never be king.”