The Tory leadership farce is turning Britain into hell – it should be quickly ended

Would it be a great affront to democracy if the Tory leadership race were at this point to be quietly terminated and the inevitable victor declared?

It is hardly an exercise in democracy to begin with. This method of choosing a new prime minister – through the tiny, and entirely unrepresentative membership of one political party – is already something of an aberration. It is meant to be the exceptional way in which a government is changed. It has become the rule. For the last six months, the Conservative Party has been refusing to answer straightforward questions about how it vets and checks the people who join it. It won’t provide much by way of data with regard to who its voting members actually are.

The UK is a nuclear power. The process by which a new finger is about to alight on its red button is being organised mainly by elderly volunteers. It is all rather odd.

But mainly, this ever-rising sense of the country having become a dystopian horror show has to be brought to an end.

Even after Brexit, and Covid, and the war in Ukraine, there can be few times when the news headlines were as constantly shocking and terrifying. And they are made more so by there being no government making any attempt to do anything about them. We hear from Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak every single day. We hear almost nothing about what they are going to do about any of it. And what little we do hear is tempered by the knowledge that, for a fair while yet, they are powerless to do anything.

On Wednesday night, the not exactly sensationalist BBC News at Ten was a 30-minute-long horror show. In Belfast, shoppers were stopped in the street outside supermarkets to reveal the pitiful amount of groceries than had been able to afford. In Devon, families that couldn’t afford to go abroad were holidaying on the beach but couldn’t swim in the sea because it had been flooded with human s**t.

In London, there was news of one of the most horrific murders of recent times, an 87-year-old busker stabbed and killed while playing his accordion.

Earlier, on Sky News, a nurse, explained how she is living off protein shakes not only because they are cheap to buy but also because they are cheap to prepare. She earns £35,000 a year and can’t switch on her oven.

Last week, there was the tale of the Chinese restaurant in Aberdeen, that’s been run by the same man for decades and who is now closing after getting a £10,000 gas bill for a single three-month period. Its owner, Martin Tang, is as shrewd as any other small businessman. He is, in his own words, “losing money every time I switch the burner on”. By his calculation, he would have to charge £28 for a chicken curry.

This gathering hellscape is well known and well understood by now. It is a wonder that the Conservative Party does not have the mechanisms to ensure this wild self-indulgence must stop.

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While it is certainly true that most people aren’t as tortured by the Tory leadership contest as the media are, who are forced to watch the same event on loop day after day for 42 days, most people are certainly tortured by what is not happening as a consequence of it.

The fear would be enough by itself, but the fear coupled by the complete sense of inaction from those who should be acting is doing lasting damage to the national psyche, and almost certainly to the Conservative Party itself and the eventual winner of its torturous contest, whose identity we almost certainly already know.

There is so much misery piling up everywhere, the race to decide the next prime minister scarcely gets a look in. Leadership has become not merely conspicuous by its absence but actively complicit.

Things simply cannot go on like this. The self-indulgence has more than run its course. There is not another fortnight to spare.