The race is on between Johnson and Hunt, but when it comes to Brexit nothing’s changed

When the European Council granted the UK an extension to the Article 50 deadline, and the council’s president Donald Tusk begged the British public not to waste the opportunity, this phantasmagorical circus of a Tory leadership election was not what they had in mind.

The idea was for Britain to spend some months coming up with a way of breaking the deadlock on Brexit. Instead, our governing party has indulged in a veritable orgy of distraction. All jolly good fun for the leadership candidates, the MPs, the journalists and other inhabitants of the Westminster bubble; plus a masterpiece of precision whipping by Boris Johnson’s point man, Gavin Williamson. It was almost as if the narrowness of the margin of Jeremy Hunt over Michael Gove was achieved by “lending” some of Mr Johnson’s votes to Mr Hunt, and designed to maximise Mr Gove’s pain.

However, the result has not advanced the cause of solving the Brexit crisis. The conclusion was drawn that Theresa May was a rotten salesperson for the “Malthouse compromise”, or some other wheeze to cane the withdrawal agreement, and that everything would be fine with a new salesperson. We shall soon see if Mr Johnson or Mr Hunt will do a better job.

Which one? Some 160,000 or so members of the Conservative Party, quite outrageously, are about to choose the next prime minister of the UK, on behalf of the 46 million people on the electoral register who can only sit and wonder as the Tories construct a vast echo chamber in which these two contenders compete to out-macho and repeat back to their membership their own prejudices in ever more lurid and extreme terms. The rest of the country can only sit and watch in despair at more blue-on-blue horror.

It was not the most diverse competition. The Tories will be deciding whether they want Boris Johnson (Balliol College, Oxford, former foreign secretary) or Jeremy Hunt (Magdalen College, Oxford, foreign secretary) to replace Theresa May (St Hugh’s College, Oxford). With the exception of Sajid Javid and Esther McVey’s personal stories, and the creative dissidence of Rory Stewart, this election has been an astonishingly narrow, not to say insular, affair.

The UK, far from getting on with a Final Say referendum to break the political impasse, will now embark upon a leisurely four-week process of regional hustings and a postal ballot to elect a new Conservative leader. He will be in office just before the long summer recess. By then a new EU Commission may, or may not, have been chosen. Traditionally, not much gets done in Whitehall or Brussels in August.

The chances are, thus, that no progress on “renegotiating” the withdrawal agreement will have been made, even by 31 October. As Mr Stewart so honestly acknowledged – and even at times hinted by Mr Johnson and Mr Hunt – such is the scale of the task that it is impossible to see it being resolved by then. It is more than a matter of putting a time limit on the Irish backstop, or using the power of belief in Britain and personal magnetism or grasp of detail to make the EU bend to the UK’s will.

If there was a quick and easy way to fix Brexit, surely it might have been discovered by now? We are, in other words, trying, yet again, to do everything Ms May tried when she attempted to revise her withdrawal agreement around the turn of the year, and the UK’s new PM will fail for the same reasons. But the only thing that Mr Johnson or Mr Hunt have that Ms May lacks is their personalities. That may not be enough to make the 27 governments of the EU change their minds, still less the House of Commons.

Nor, truth be told, is the “threat” of no deal. For months this has been talked about as if it was the diplomatic equivalent of a fleet of Trident nuclear subs – the ultimate deterrent. It is a weapon that, one way or another, the House of Commons will once again break in the hands of the new prime minister who, of course, inherits the identical parliamentary arithmetic to their predecessor.

The EU knows full well it is an empty threat. It would hurt the UK far more than the EU, in any event. Parliament, a remain parliament as it is derided, rejects no deal, and will find a way of blocking it. If a determined prime minister tries to override it, by prorogation, then he will find himself facing down the Queen. It is not somewhere a Tory PM should want to be.

Brexit is collapsing under the writ of its own internal contractions. Ms May was not a stupid or incompetent person, though she made her mistakes. She was supported by a superb civil service machine, and not some Remain establishment conspiracy. She took the red lines she assumed had been given to her by the British people in the referendum and, less forcefully, the 2017 election and applied them to the talks. The EU did the same. The product was the withdrawal agreement and the political declaration, plus a few side letters. That package was to be the deal that would deliver Brexit.

Admittedly, it should also require democratic assent via a referendum, and it was flawed in important respects. But it was a deal. It was the best deal, given the economic fundamental and diplomatic realities that could be obtained. Soon we will see how much progress a new face with fresh ideas and clever tactics will have in getting a better deal out of the EU, or indeed getting the Commons to compromise where it has hitherto refused. We will be back to square one. The Article 50 extension will have been squandered.

The best that can be hoped for is that if Mr Johnson does win, his fabulously pragmatic approach to political promises will be turned to good use, and he will turn again to the British people to solve the problem via a referendum. If not, and we somehow do end up leaving without a deal, the economic mess will finish his party off for a generation. It will be interesting to hear the excuses they try to make.