What’s missing from the Conservative Party leadership contest

As did Liz Truss before them, the next Prime Minister will face an extremely challenging in-try. Perhaps, along with the Truss in-tray, the most challenging any new Prime Minister has faced since 1940.

At the heart of that is a series of economic and financial problems, even crises, to which there are four categories of action to pick and mix from: decisions on spending, taxes, redistribution and boosting growth. Truss’s mix was a dreadful mix, made worse by adding in a cavalier disregard for the idea that policies should be costs.

(It wasn’t just the “mini”-Budget that didn’t tell us, or the financial markets, how it would be paid for, so too had the fuel costs plan before that and so too didn’t the rounds of further tax cuts disastrous briefed the media immediately after the “mini”-Budget.)

We know that the next Prime Minster, or at least their Chancellor, almost certainly will return to the idea that big financial policies should be accompanied by numbers that add up.

But beyond that? There’s a huge range of different choices to make from those four categories. That’s true even if you narrow down the range by only thinking of mixes from the perspective of a Conservative MP or member.

So where’s the debate about which mix each would-be new leader is offering?

For Boris Johnson in particular, with such a varied mix of undelivered promises in his political past, it’s far from obvious what mix he would pick. But that same doubt applies to them all.

So while political journalists are all caught up in the excitement of the personal dramas (and will no doubt write off the back of that some brilliant books I’ll happily binge on), the big substantive challenge for our next Prime Minister is being left to one side.

That’s not a healthy way for a democracy to function. It’s not even a healthy way for the Conservative Party to operate itself. Because what mandate will a new PM have for those difficult decisions if they didn’t even win a leadership contest, let alone a public election, based on a plan for what they will do?

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