The country needs a swift leadership race

There are now more candidates for leader of the Tory party than there are Lib Dem MPS, with Mark Harper the 12th to declare and presumably more to follow. There’s an argument for having a wide field to allow talented outsiders to audition and, perhaps, elect somebody no one expected. But too many of these challengers are obviously auditioning for the Cabinet rather than No 10, exploiting the contest to score a TV interview they would otherwise never get. And the joke in Westminster is that it’s becoming quicker to count who isn’t running rather than who is.

Isn’t this supposed to be a very serious business? Shouldn’t the candidates who get through to the final two have experience commensurate to the office and, in a divided Parliament, real support among MPS? Iain Duncan Smith advises the 1922 committee to rethink the rules by, say, requiring more nominations to make it on to the ballot, or having two or three candidates “drop off in the early rounds to try and accelerate the process”.

But then there’s the law of unintended consequences to consider. Jeremy Corbyn is in charge of Labour thanks to various attempts to tweak the way the party elects its leader, and it would probably be way ahead in the polls today if he’d never made it on to the ballot. Plus, there is a risk that artificially whittling down the number of candidates will alienate the membership. The Tories now boast over 160,000 members, thanks no doubt to the allure of being able to pick the next prime minister. They won’t stand for a stitch-up.

Any rule changes that lead, intentionally or not, to a final battle between two candidates of the status quo will be denying the public the Brexit debate they deserve. Some of the candidates want to continue Theresa May’s approach: they seem to think that with a bit more dialogue and empathy, they can get her withdrawal deal over the line. Others prefer to make the threat of a no-deal Brexit more credible in order to renegotiate from strength – and one or two of them have made the logical link between that and an economic strategy based upon lower taxes.

This is the discussion that needs to be had, ideally in a contest that is thorough but also, for the sake of a country in political crisis, orderly and swift. After all, when selecting a PM, one has to think beyond the membership, to what is in the interests of the entire nation. Britain needs a new PM – the right PM – sooner rather than later.