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Margaret Thatcher was right. Leadership Elections are improper in the governing party. If MPs have lost confidence in the Prime Minister, then they have lost confidence in the Government, and they ought to bring a motion to that effect to the floor of the House of Commons.

When a Leadership Election in office was absolutely unavoidable, then a party would need to accept that either its Leader, and thus the Prime Minister, was going to be elected by its MPs alone, or its internally determined shortlist of two was going to be submitted to an election among all registered parliamentary electors in the United Kingdom. In the twenty-first century, then it would probably have to be the latter. No party could afford that. But the State could. As for the more than financial cost, call it the price of success.

Still, here we are. Liz Truss will be the third woman to have led the Conservative Party, but the first to have been elected by its members, and only the second to have been elected to the Leadership by anyone at all. In 2008, with no option of a white man, the Democratic Party preferred even a black man to a white woman. The Labour Party would do the same. But the Conservative Party is on course to prefer even a white woman to a brown man, and the Republican Party would do the same as that. Read across the corresponding parties in many lands. Identify the corresponding parties by doing so.

How this kind of thing makes its way into every nook and cranny. I have been told that the right-wing Labour machine's candidate-in-waiting here at North West Durham, although never resident here, has even left Twitter on the orders of "the party" while it tried to salvage second place next time by matching me with someone who was over 40, who was male by every definition, who had been politically active in this constituency for decades, and who was a practising Catholic, but who trumped me by being a pure-blood Caucasian, locally born, a cradle Catholic, and married with children. The search continues.