Janet Daley:

The absurd number of candidates is destroying credibility – it’s time for the grown-ups to step in

It’s a bad sign when too many people are fighting to be leader of a political party. That might seem counter-intuitive: after all, if the job is so sought after, it must be worth having. Ergo, the party in question must be thought to be in robust health. In fact, the absurd, ever-expanding number of candidates for the Tory leadership is a sign of a party in utter, undisciplined chaos with no sense of orderly accession or agreement on a coherent message.

The lack of humility and decorum has gone beyond embarrassing to comic. (Much the same circumstance prevails in the US, where the Democratic Party, at the latest count, has more than 20 active presidential hopefuls.) This is positively silly, not to mention grossly undignified and seriously damaging to the party’s credibility. The people are not fooled. They see this plethora of candidates not as an overabundance of talent but rather a dearth of modesty and self-knowledge.

It’s time for the unserious people to go. It was all good fun for a moment, but now the small fry are putting at risk the possibility of clear-cut voting majorities for the realistic, plausible

figures. OK, guys, you have put down your marker, as everybody keeps saying, for a future leadership try, or for a major Cabinet post. Now you can behave like team players and get out of the way.

That much seems fairly obvious. What may be less evident is that some of the big players are going to implode – or take each other out – quite soon. At the moment, probably inevitably, we have a veritable TV reality show in which celebrity contestants are being tested for survival – although some of them seem to be going about this rather oddly by remaining weirdly silent, as if one of the challenges involved staying mute for as long as possible. But the length of this exposure is, in itself, a trial.

Trying to avoid doing or saying something fatally damaging for what feels like an eternity – during the most memorably contentious period in modern British history – is actually quite a useful test of a prime minister, who will have to engage in nerve-racking negotiations with an intransigent interlocutor.

I fear that at least one of the leading contestants, Jeremy Hunt, may already have blown it. Lesson: don’t give too many interviews. However attractively emollient your personality may appear in troubled times, you’re bound to slip up and say something your opponents won’t let you forget. Dominic Raab seems to be living dangerously, too, but he is clearly relying on being unapologetically and consistently hard in his stance on Brexit (and most other things), which could serve him well in the end.

The Big Stars – Michael Gove and Boris Johnson – both have big problems. The former is regarded as having been both genuinely brilliant and formidably competent as a minister. But, my goodness, he does have some devastating baggage. There are those who will never cease to regard him as politically untrustworthy and of doubtful judgment since he is believed to have withdrawn support from Boris too soon and from Theresa May too late. These difficulties are not insurmountable, but they are formidable. I personally believe he would do the job well – if he succeeded in getting it.

And then there is Boris, who has decided (or been advised – probably both) to say absolutely nothing, even to the journalists who doorstep him, with whom he has been (dangerously) loquacious in the past. Whatever his virtues in terms of actual, substantive opinions and star quality, his chief liability is the startling degree of enmity that he attracts. The moral opprobrium heaped upon him seems more suited to a mass murderer than a man whose character flaws are not uncommon in political life. But, whether or not all this vituperation is justified, it is clearly and unavoidably a fact, which must figure in the equation. It would not make the task of resolving our difficulties with the EU any easier to have a prime minister who was widely and noisily loathed and disrespected.

Of course, many of the voices raised against him are from quarters that are self-evidently vested interests: the Remain camp in the media and that section of the business lobby for which EU membership is particularly advantageous. Last week’s contribution to the anti-Boris campaign from the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) – which accounts for a notably small proportion of UK industry and whose members are more likely than not to be global companies – resurrected his reckless “F--business” quote as if it had been said in all seriousness, when it was clearly meant as an exasperated repudiation of the insistence that business – often in the form of the CBI – had the right to call the shots over the nation’s future. But the fact remains: it was a stupid thing to say.

Message to the CBI: it is elected governments that determine trade relations in the interests of the country as a whole. If we were not in a state of national constitutional confusion, your intervention would be seen as the arrogant bluster that it is. Message to leadership contenders: don’t say stupid things.

It is perfectly fair for the electorate to extrapolate from how you behave as an exasperated candidate to how you would behave as an exasperated negotiator in Brussels. Boris was a friend to business as mayor of London, and would be as prime minister, but none of that will matter if he is thought likely to say stupid things.

So the field is going to narrow. This week, the 1922 Committee may change the rules to allow only candidates with a sensible number of supporters on to the ballots. Maybe, out of the sane shadows will come some grown-ups whose dignity and integrity are beyond reproach and who can command respect even among the antagonists in the party. The former chairman of that very 1922 Committee, Sir Graham Brady, is an obvious possibility. The man who sponsored the amendment to the doomed Withdrawal Agreement that Parliament actually approved could be the one to halt what will turn into a grotesque, egomaniacal mud fight if somebody doesn’t get a grip soon.

Message to the CBI: governments determine trade relations. Message to leadership contenders: don’t say stupid things