If you asked voters at least up to the 2015 general election what they thought of the Conservative Party, it is highly likely that one of the responses would have been that it is able to get things done. If Tory governments were not always popular, in the popular mind they have at the very least been seen as effective.

For Conservatives, this has historically been a badge of honour – a key aspect of the party’s traditional self-image and their offer to the public, alongside respect for institutions, rule of law, an instinctive aversion to dramatic change, and a talent for winning elections. Indeed, at the 2012 Tory conference, Boris Johnson gave a speech in which he praised David Cameron’s government as “a broom that is cleaning up the mess left by the Labour government”. 

By contrast, it should surely now be crystal clear that Boris Johnson is himself a Prime Minister totally against the Tory type. 

Yesterday’s Sky interview saw the man who delivered the largest Conservative majority since Margaret Thatcher pleading for his job because no one told him the function he was attending was a party (and therefore against his own rules) – laying bare the extent to which this Government is the result of a Faustian pact in which the membership sacrificed the Tory brand’s long-term reputation for competence in return for the alleged benefits of his star power. 

Faced with the Brexit division and an anti-Semitic Marxist in charge of Labour, it’s likely a different Tory leader could have delivered a majority in 2019. (Indeed, Theresa May might well have done so in 2017 had she run a more disciplined campaign.) Whatever the truth of this, Johnson certainly isn’t looking like a sure-fire winner next time. In which case, the question must be: what is the point of the Tories under his leadership? With the PM’s personal allure gone, the governing party now just looks incompetent. So the opportunity – and the absolute necessity after 12 years in power – must be to elect a leader who unquestionably is capable of governing. 

Which begs the question: who in the field of potential challengers has the record of executive leadership and delivery to do the job?

If the top three contenders are Jeremy Hunt, Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, then Hunt is clearly the standout candidate, with a serious track record of achievement. A Cabinet minister from 2010, he served in domestic and foreign ministries, including the Department of Health (for over six years). He is a sensible, evidence-driven and affable politician who emerged from government with his reputation enhanced and has had an excellent run as chair of the health select committee during the pandemic. Those who unfairly characterise him as relatively undynamic might remember that his leadership campaign was arguably stronger than Johnson’s (something which must explain his otherwise inexcusable sacking in 2019). 

Rishi Sunak has had a good pandemic. He is hugely respected by the Treasury and is clearly signed up to the post-Thatcherite consensus on economics. Unlike the Prime Minister, he believes in balancing the books. He is an attractive figure who looks very much like modern Britain, and a gifted communicator. 

This is all very promising, but the most difficult bit is yet to come: when the fiscal retrenchment starts, his mettle will be severely tested. Sunak has not been blooded as Chancellor in the same way that George Osborne was right from the start of his time in No 11. Until that happens, it’s difficult to say how he might perform as PM. 

Which brings us to Liz Truss. The Foreign Secretary is the great survivor, having been first appointed to Cabinet in 2014. She certainly knows how to market herself, and has honed the art of telling Tory activists what they want to hear. But is she any good? She prospered in international trade – though few of the deals she announced were genuinely new – but before that held successive domestic roles in which she was at best fine (as Chief Secretary to the Treasury), and at worst a disaster (as Justice Secretary). 

Compared to Hunt and Sunak, a bet on Truss looks much more like another Borisian Pact – a further departure from the previous, election-winning habit of picking leaders who can clean up what went before them. 

Whoever emerges as the favourite, the pork-pie plotters – today seemingly desperate for a change of leadership – will find their route to a viable replacement fraught with uncertainty. 

James Dowling is a former Conservative special adviser and a former Treasury official