Time is running out for a new Tory leader

The result of the elections in Ukraine is further evidence that no mainstream political party or leadership is safe from the march of populism across Europe. Of course there were issues peculiar to Ukraine that played a crucial role in the outcome: the unpopularity of the Poroshenko government; the rise in corruption that it was pledged to defeat; and the country’s continuing worries over Russian intentions.

But that hardly explains the extraordinary triumph of Volodymyr Zelenskiy in taking more than 70 per cent of the vote in a landslide victory. In a bizarre example of life imitating fiction, Mr Zelenskiy is an actor and comedian who has recently starred in a television show about a teacher who is unexpectedly elected to the presidency after his students post his angry rant about corruption online.

Did Ukrainians elect the TV character or the real Mr Zelenskiy, who has no political experience? It is likely, as we have seen elsewhere in the world, that they are simply heartily sick of being promised actions and outcomes by established politicians that are just never delivered.

Donald Trump had no experience of politics but was well known both as a businessman and the host of a TV show before he ran for the American presidency. In Italy, Beppe Grillo, founder of the Five Star movement, was a satirist and comic. His party is now in the ruling coalition. Outsiders are winning everywhere. Emmanuel Macron took the French presidency by playing up his credentials as a non-establishment figure, even if he appears to have disappointed voters by reverting to type.

Here in the UK, the shock waves caused by Brexit and the failure to deliver on promises to leave the EU are generating their own populist tsunami. A sign of the damage this episode has inflicted on the mainstream parties will come next week with the local government elections in England and Wales.

The ultimate outsider, Nigel Farage, has formed a party to contest next month’s European elections which looks certain to win the most votes should the polls go ahead. This threatens to be an existential crisis for the Conservatives, with three out of five Tory members telling a survey that they would vote for the Brexit Party.

To survive, they need a populist leader, someone who can raise morale, take the fight to the hard Left, set out an optimistic course for the country and deliver Brexit. They need to move soon.