It might be hard to take the future of the Conservative party seriously right now – but we must | Martin Kettle

The UK needs a robust, competent centre-right party to stave off the threat of the populist right

The contest to succeed Rishi Sunak as Conservative leader may seem like an argument between corpses in a tomb. The candidates are yesterday’s rejects. Not even the hysterical headline-writers of the Tory press can bring themselves to hype the race as they would in the triumphalist years. The infantile tabloid screams of “Boris this” or “Suella that” seem to have gone quiet, though probably only briefly.

After the babel of those years, a period of relative Tory silence will be welcome to many. But the future of the Conservative party is a genuinely important matter – not just to Tories themselves, but also to the workings of parliamentary democracy and to the dynamics of British politics. The election to succeed Sunak, the preliminaries of which began this week, should not be scorned as an irrelevant event.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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