The Tories don't want 'normal'. Let the insanity continue with KemiKaze and Honest Bob

A day on from the latest leadership ballot and still no one in the Tory party can quite work out how Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick made it through to the last two. So what chance do the rest of us have? All we can do is applaud them for their comic timing.

- John Crace

In one corner we have Kemi Kaze. A woman who is actively dangerous. And in the other we have an overgrown schoolboy who is dangerously stupid. Honest Bob makes Jimmy Dimly look like an intellectual giant.

Far be it from me to interrupt the Tory party as it turns farce into annihilation. Already some Tory MPs are wandering around Westminster looking ashen-faced. Shellshocked. You can find them begging to turn back time so they can have a second chance to make things better. To do something relatively sane for the first time in ages. Yet their pleas go unheard. Reality cannot be reverse-engineered. They had their chance to vote for a man whose main pitch was that he was a bit more normal than the others, and they laughed in James Cleverly's face. He could shove his reasonableness where the sun don't shine.

The cock-up theory of history is the preferred explanation among the small clique of the Conservative thinking class. That what they have always liked to believe was the "most sophisticated electorate in the world" (TM) had a collective brainfart.