The crisis at the heart of the Conservative party

It is always interesting to read the Wikipedia pages of plane crashes. Thanks to the data recovered from black boxes, especially the cockpit voice recordings, the last moments of flights can be recreated with vivid accuracy. The most interesting are those caused largely by human error.

In those final fateful moments, you can observe highly intelligent, highly trained professionals making error after error, gradually dooming them and their passengers. Despite the ringing alarms of the onboard systems, they lose sight of what they are doing or how to avoid the impending doom. They pull the joystick instead of releasing it, they shut down the working engine instead of the failing one, or sometimes the two pilots pull in different directions, cancelling each other out. Eventually, they hit the Point of No Return and, shortly after, the ground.

The current Conservative leadership election has a similar atmosphere. Every day in this interminably long contest, the final two candidates fire out press releases and half-formed policy proposals, only to wind them back in – flailing around the controls they want to wield in a month’s time.