Rory Stewart is an icon of the infantilisation of politics

It resembles that blessed moment of relief, in an hotel or restaurant, when an unruly child who has been making an intolerable noise, running around the room and pestering diners is finally removed by his feeble parents. Rory has left the building.

What on earth was the aberration that was Rory Stewart’s delusory bid for the premiership all about? What were Conservative MPs thinking about, indulging this natural candidate for membership of Change.UK so far as the third round of a leadership election contest when the Tory party is on the verge of extinction?

Roaming the countryside like Richard Hannay in search of the thirty-nine steps, Stewart was clearly engaged in living out some personal fantasy. His supporters coyly implied he had been employed by MI6 – which would explain a lot about British geopolitical disasters in the past couple of decades.

Stewart is a defiant former Remainer, yet some Tories thought he was just what they needed to see off Nigel Farage. They threw Brexiteer Dominic Raab out of the balloon, but kept Stewart on board, at least for one more round. What message did they imagine that sent to their already infuriated supporters?

It is worth noting, too, that they indulged in this provocation on Tuesday afternoon – after seeing the results of a YouGov poll that showed 54 per cent of members would rather see the Conservative Party destroyed than forgo Brexit, while 46 per cent would be happy if Nigel Farage became Tory leader.

MPs had a ready response to that: eliminating Dominic Raab from the contest and putting Rory Stewart through to the next round. Even though Stewart has now been eliminated, the impact of that slap in the face to Brexiteers will not recede into oblivion.

The Stewart candidacy, enabled by his fellow MPs, for all its farcical aspects had a malevolent effect. It trumpeted elitist entitlement. The nation, at a moment of grave crisis, is trying to find a prime minister to lead it out of the European Union; but to Stewart it offered the opportunity for a bit of a jape, a grandstanding marathon, an exercise in extravagant narcissism. To the public it spelled out what it already suspected: this is what the Conservative party is about – transgressive behaviour by the self-indulgent privileged.

The fact that, so far from increasing his vote in the third round, he lost 10 supporters suggests that even his colleagues were becoming aware of the damage he was doing. Or perhaps, watching his contortions on his BBC bar stool, they concluded it would be unwise to elect a prime minister apparently a martyr to haemorrhoids. As for his greeting to the since discredited imam “Salaam Alaikum” (Aw, puleeze!), one wonders how this juvenile one-upmanship went down with Sajid Javid.

The stripping off his tie on live television was a ritual celebration of his Cameroon sympathies. In fact, Stewart ran the perfect campaign for winning the 2005 leadership contest and if he had been a contender then would probably have trounced David Cameron. The elimination of Stewart, however, does not solve the Conservative party’s problems.

Looking at the collection of candidates in the BBC studio, many conservative Britons will have uttered a sigh of despair. This was a contest for the leadership of the Liberal Democrat Party. Of conservatism there was little discernible trace.

None of these candidates would countenance the perfectly legal prorogation of parliament – the sole practical means by which Brexit can definitely be achieved. When Javid demanded an inquiry into supposed Conservative “Islamophobia”, not even Boris had the guts to say: “Not on your life. This is a transparent distraction to take the heat off genuine and rampant Labour anti-Semitism.”

This dire leadership contest has furnished only one surprise. Who would have imagined that in a field of fewer than a dozen runners, Boris would not be the most prominent buffoon? By taking that role upon himself, Stewart unintentionally lent Boris some gravitas.

At any rate it is a relief that the disruptive brat Rory has been removed from the room and sent early to bed. The problem is that the relative tranquillity resulting from his absence leaves us contemplating without distraction the melange of mediocrities proposing themselves for the office of Prime Minister.

Whichever of them wins – Boris, presumably – will proceed to perpetrate the next betrayal of Brexit. That can be infallibly predicted. In turn, that will precipitate the annihilation of the Conservative Party: its own members have given clear notice in Tuesday’s YouGov poll that they will not hesitate to trigger the nuclear option if May’s dog-eared deal is brought out again, inadequately disguised in a fresh cover, or Britain remains in the EU one minute after midnight on Halloween.

Many Conservative MPs know that, factually, but not emotionally. Their ingrained sense of entitlement will not allow them to process the information logically. Hence the carefree romp with Rory Stewart, the latest icon of the infantilization of politics. They think the buffoonery can go on forever, but the end is coming soon.