It turns out that even after ten years spent covering them for a living, it is still possible to over-estimate Conservative MPs. When that happens commentators such as I need to hold our hands up, admit fault, and try to do better next time.

My error was supposing that a One Nation candidate would reach the membership ballot in the leadership contest. In the second round the parliamentary party split almost perfectly between the two candidates of the Right and the rest of the pack; neither Kemi Badenoch nor Robert Jenrick was making a priority of reassuring Tory centrists. 

There were enough votes to put either James Cleverly or Tom Tugendhat in the final – and that was before last week’s Party Conference in Birmingham, which seemed to turbocharge Cleverly’s campaign. It also made sense for both he and Jenrick to prefer to face each other in the final round rather than Badenoch, who polling suggests would beat either man.

In the end, however, it was yet another reminder that the best aid to navigating “the most sophisticated electorate in the world” is a south-facing compass. Badenoch had no route to the final if both camps kept their eyes on the prize – so of course she made it. Once again, the Tory centrists have face-planted in full view of the watching nation. Somehow, despite their having half the votes, we have ended up with a right-vs-right final, and a section of Conservative MPs seeming to suggest that the new leader won’t have their confidence.

Supposedly, Cleverly lost because a large number of his supporters were so confident of his victory that they started trying to choose his opponent. Cleverly himself spent hours on the critical night at Boris Johnson’s book launch. A more clear-cut example of Aesop’s fable of the hare and the tortoise, British politics has not produced for some time.

Whatever wing of the party you’re from, this is extremely bad news. Getting the Conservatives fit to contend for office again is going to be a hard slog — both in terms of reforming the party and in terms of convincing the public — and involves the new leader forcing it to confront some unpleasant political realities, not least on issues such as planning and pensions.

For that, the new leader will need authority, and the loser’s consent. At present, it looks as though they will already have a serious problem on their left and by the end of the contest, perhaps on their right as well. With Badenoch and Jenrick just a vote apart amongst MPs, we can already trace the outlines of tomorrow’s mutinous caucuses.

Maybe the membership ballot will resolve things decisively. But perhaps not. Despite the extreme length of this leadership contest overall, functionally the membership section is less than two weeks long, lasting only from yesterday until the point the ballots start landing and being returned. That isn’t much time for either candidate to get around the country and change many minds.

Step back, and the whole thing is just a bravura display of administrative incompetence.

First, the 1922 Committee designed a very long contest that left the party saddled with a placeholder front bench, but then policed the contest so strictly that the first five weeks of it saw zero change in the polling. It’s understandable that the party should want to avoid the sort of very public bloodletting we saw when Rishi Sunak faced off, but if that was a priority the responsible option was a short contest. What we got seems to have pleased nobody; even Sunak hasn’t taken advantage of the extended swansong, instead all but disappearing from public life.

Second, it stretched things out to bring four candidates to Party Conference (and shake them down for £200,000 each for the privilege), only for MPs to then vote out the one candidate who actually seemed to have connected with members in Birmingham.

Is the Conservative Party being controlled by a cabal of sketchwriters or something?

Finally, having designed our system explicitly to maximise the role of MPs, we have nonetheless already got a section of the party signalling their lack of confidence in the new leader – because that section was so disorganised that it managed to turn 50 per cent of the MPs’ votes into nothing. How can these people claim to represent competent leadership, as opposed to the alleged populism of Badenoch or Jenrick, when they cannot organise themselves, never mind the party, never mind the country?

All of which has probably significantly shortened the odds that we will all be back here doing this again before the end of the Parliament. Is the Conservative Party being controlled by a cabal of sketchwriters or something? I need a longer holiday.