The Conservative Party, a collection of self-serving ghouls who couldn’t organize a drink-up in a brewery they’ve already sold to a private equity firm, is currently patting itself on the back for choosing Kemi Badenoch. It is the political equivalent of choosing which brand of industrial-grade bleach you’d like to have poured into your eyes. Meanwhile, the punditry—those professional observers of the slow-motion car crash that is British governance—suggests we should mourn the loss of Robert Jenrick’s influence. As if this human weather vane, a man who shifts his convictions more often than a panicked chameleon on a disco floor, actually possessed a 'vision' worth saving.

Henry Hill, writing from the intellectual bunker known as ConservativeHome—a place where reality goes to die in a wingback chair—suggests the party might miss Jenrick more than they think. This is like suggesting a sinking ship might miss the particular rat that knew exactly where the hull was the thinnest. Jenrick is being framed as the man who understood 'where the Conservatives have been going wrong.' Newsflash for the cognitively impaired: everyone with a pulse and a basic grasp of arithmetic knows where they went wrong. They spent fourteen years treating the national treasury like a personal ATM and the public service sector like a tiresome chore they could outsource to their golf buddies.

Badenoch wins because she represents the current Tory fetish: the culture war as a substitute for actual governance. If you cannot fix the housing market, the energy crisis, or the crumbling NHS, you can at least yell at a cloud about 'identity politics' until the elderly voters in the shires feel a brief, warm glow of misplaced nostalgia. She is a leader for an era of 'vibes,' a woman whose primary talent is sounding like a disappointed headmistress while delivering absolutely nothing of substance. She is the 'stronger leader' only in the sense that a hurricane is stronger than a light breeze; both result in a catastrophic mess, but one is significantly more obnoxious about the destruction it leaves behind.

And then there is Jenrick, the 'dangerous rival.' The man who suddenly discovered he was a hardline immigration hawk the moment he realized his previous persona of 'bland bureaucratic drone' wasn't winning him any invitations to the cool kid table at GB News. To watch the Tory punditry debate whether Jenrick is a 'talented opportunist' or a 'man of conviction' is to watch a group of people debate whether a puddle of tepid water is actually a secret, deep-sea trench. He is a careerist. He is a Tory. In the modern lexicon, these terms have become perfectly interchangeable.

The fundamental tragedy—if one can find tragedy in the comedic death-throes of a political institution—is the belief that either of these people matters. The party is a hollowed-out husk, a collection of grifters and egoists who have forgotten that the purpose of a political party is to, occasionally, govern the country. Instead, they treat the leadership of the opposition as a personal branding exercise, a way to secure a future of lucrative speaking engagements and board memberships. They are fighting over the steering wheel of a car that is currently being crushed in a scrapyard, oblivious to the fact that the wheels were sold for scrap years ago.

The 'grassroots' voters Jenrick supposedly 'represents' are just as complicit in this farce. They want a savior who will tell them that their decline isn't their own fault, that it is all the fault of some shadowy 'elite' or a cross-channel dinghy. They don't want solutions; they want someone to validate their bitterness. Jenrick provided that validation with the practiced ease of a man who has never held a sincere belief in his life. Badenoch provides it with a sharper, more abrasive edge. Both are selling the same toxic product: the lie that the Tory party is still a relevant force for anything other than its own survival.

Ultimately, the Tory party’s 'triumph' in selecting a leader is just another chapter in the long, boring book of British decline. Whether it is Badenoch’s performative outrage or Jenrick’s opportunistic populism, the result remains the same: a country left to rot while its supposed leaders argue over the best way to describe the smell of the decay. We are told to watch this space, to see if the party can reinvent itself under new management. I’d rather watch paint dry; at least the paint has the decency to eventually stop being a nuisance once it's finished its job of being useless.