Rishi Sunak lost. Get over it

The WhatsApp message doing the rounds in Westminster yesterday was succinct: ‘Rishi PM. Hunt CX. Penny FS. And it’s a done deal’. Except that the only thing that’s ‘done’ is the Conservatives as a credible party of government. If there is indeed a stitch-up, one that sees the installation of the beaten leadership candidates as prime minister, chancellor, and foreign secretary, then the Tories can kiss goodbye not only to the next few general elections but also to their very existence as the most successful governing party in the democratic world.

How has the party that swept back into power just three years ago with a massive 80-seat majority so comprehensively trashed its reputation for competent government? How has the world’s oldest election-winning machine, the party of Disraeli, Churchill and Thatcher – not to mention Boris Johnson – transformed itself into a global laughing stock, universally regarded with a mixture of pity, loathing and contempt?

This farce is not about the fast-dissolving political career of Liz Truss; it is the existential struggle for the very survival of the party which has governed Britain for much of the past two centuries.