Russell Jones's Week Moment: 'The Most Sophisticated Electorate in the World'

Even the bestselling author of 'The Decade in Tory' didn't anticipate quite how farcical the Conservative leadership election would get this week

“What if rollercoasters never ended, and everybody hated them?”

The French moralist Luc de Clapiers once observed that, “the most absurd and reckless aspirations have sometimes led to extraordinary success”, an aphorism that perhaps inspired George Osborne to call his parliamentary colleagues, “The most sophisticated electorate in the world”.

Well, Luc de Clapiers got the absurd bit right. Aspiration? Maybe. Let’s face it: the Tories are nothing if not ambitious. Why else would they choose to combine a leadership election with an experiment entitled: “What if rollercoasters never ended, and everybody hated them?”

I don’t know why I didn’t see these farcical events coming. After all, I began the week watching James Cleverly with that sense of foreboding you get when a bit-player in an Alien movie tells everybody about the farm he’s going to live on when all of this is over. He’ll be dead before the popcorn runs out. You could almost hear the ominous score swelling as Cleverly urged the party to “be more normal”, before a record-scratch, a scream, and the Benny Hill theme.