Russell Jones's Week Moment: The Newly-Shrunken Violet vs The Officious Potato

The bestselling author of 'The Decade in Tory' on the Conservative Party's battle for sustained irrelevance taking place on the little-watched screens of GB News

It’s 26 years since, in a desperate effort to become electorally relevant, William Hague, the enfant bearable of the Conservative party, introduced the current rules for electing his party’s leaders. It was such a successful plan that Hague himself opposes doing any more of it, worrying that his own policy handed too much power to what you or I might call “Conservative Party members”, but which William Hague calls an “unrepresentative minority”.

I’m surprised they haven’t tried to deport themselves.

The entire thing has turned out to be a fiasco, and yet here we are. And we’ve been here for a while. It’s three months since the start of the current leadership campaign. After five of the things in just six years, you’d think they’d be good at it by now, but no. This one is a soaringly drab spectacle: half a dozen puerile denialists competing in a spirit of lusty, insatiable gusto to be a mid-ranking item on the lunchtime news.

We’re finally down to two campaigners, kissing hands and shaking babies while they wait for their various failings to be publicly exposed by supposed friends and colleagues. Edifying it is not.

And here comes another disappointment: Kemi Badenoch – who is what you get when you feed Suella Braverman after midnight – has refused to take part in a planned live debate on the BBC. The corporation is reporting this as a tragic loss to the “clear and wide public interest” about who leads the official opposition, overlooking the fact only the 0.3% of us who paid to be Conservative Party members will have any say in the matter.

As for newly-shrunken violet Kemi Badenoch, her reasons for running away from the debate are clear. She has nothing to gain from a clash with Jenrick, and everything to lose, since polls put her way ahead with those “unrepresentative minorities”. It doesn’t seem to matter than she’s less popular than Jenrick with every other voter, because when was the last time the Tories cared what the country thinks?