And then there were five. The contest to replace Rishi Sunak as leader of the Conservative party has tightened with the elimination of Priti Patel in a ballot of Tory MPs. Robert Jenrick led the pack. The same process will whittle the field down to four next week.
While the race is getting more intense, it shows no sign of engaging the public. Selecting opposition leaders is a niche interest outside Westminster, especially when a former ruling party is reeling from election defeat. Reduced to a rump of 121 MPs, the parliamentary Conservative party is far from power and drained of relevance to the country that recently chose an alternative government.
