Gavin Williamson got burned trying to play the Tory party's ruthless leadership game

Never, in the field of politics, have so many sought such a chalice as badly poisoned as the Tory leadership and the British premiership as they stand today

The hunt for the phantom Huawei leaker of old London Town continues. So desperate is the former defence secretary to clear his name, bizarrely swearing his innocence on his children’s lives, you wonder what Gavin Williamson might agree to next.

Perhaps he will submit to a polygraph test, live on Newsnight; or turn up at some nice old village pond to volunteer to be dunked into it, just as they used to do to test for witches (if they drowned they were innocent); or re-enact the Spanish Inquisition (the Monty Python version, which no one expects).

The possibility remains that, as with Jack the Ripper, the Mary Celeste or Michael Fabricant’s hair, we may never solve the riddle.

What is less talked about are the motives behind the non-lethal leak of a discussion at the National Security Committee – something that undoubtedly did take place, whoever was responsible.

No doubt high patriotic motive played some part, however small. No doubt, too, that baser political motives were at work.

One of the reasons that Mr Williamson fell under suspicion is that he has made no secret of his leadership ambitions, and, by the look of his mobile phone records, is an assiduous cultivator of his press contacts.

The leak, then, is simply another symptom of a wider problem, namely that the government is visibly decaying.

Like most processes of decomposition, it is so gradual and expected that, after a while, the observer ceases to pay it much attention. But this is the government. The divisions over Brexit are all too obvious, and for as long as that trauma drags on, albeit now in the background, the travails at the top of the Conservative Party will also continue.

In a sort of negative feedback loop, Brexit is used by the very many putative contenders for the prime minister’s job to further their own ambitions; those divisions then make a resolution of the Brexit crisis even more remote.

No government in modern times has suffered so many resignations of cabinet ministers, ministers of state and assorted parliamentary spear carriers in so short a time. Some had to go for personal reasons, but most went to avoid the blame for Brexit and to gather support for a future Brexit-fuelled leadership challenge. The names Boris Johnson, Dominic Raab and David Davis spring to mind, but there are many others.

Thus, even the limited bandwidth, to use the modish term, that the government can spare for matters other than Brexit – schools, hospitals, universal credit, Northern Ireland, terrorism, the housing crisis – is crowded out by internal squabbling and jostling for pole position in the leadership election that will inevitably come. Ever since Theresa May declared her intention to quit, the rivals have been circling, dropping hints, hosting champagne receptions, gossiping in corridors, setting up shadow leadership campaign teams, and making thoughtful, “wide-ranging” speeches about their philosophy. They should all, obviously, be running the country.

The prime minister, still leader of her fractious party, needs to take some of the blame for her position and the state of the country. It is not simply that Britain’s reputation abroad has been trashed; it is that people in genuine need – the “burning injustices” she once spoke so convincingly about – are being wilfully ignored. Brexit has crowded out most normal political action, and the rest has been eclipsed by the ambitions of as many as two dozen possible inheritors of Ms May’s tarnished crown.

Had she not called her snap election in 2017, and retained a slim majority in the Commons, Ms May’s authority would certainly be stronger than it is today. Had she not spent a political lifetime in a state of perpetual mistrust of those around her, a mild form of bunker mentality, she might have been able to call on more loyalty than she can today. Had Ms May not approached Brexit from the wrong direction – seeking parliamentary support at the end of the negotiations rather than at the outset, her Brexit nightmare might now be over.

Even so, as all of her recent predecessors have discovered, when the Tory party makes its mind up that it does not wish to be led, then not even the archangel Gabriel would be able to win its support. And Europe has invariably been the issue around which the trouble has started.

David Cameron faced a rebellion of backbenchers that pushed him – unwisely and disastrously as it turned out – into agreeing to an in-out EU referendum. Despite their innate Euroscepticism, Michael Howard, Iain Duncan Smith and William Hague also faced internal divisions on Europe to some degree. The “bastards” during the Maastricht debates in the 1990s virtually wrecked John Major’s premiership. Even Margaret Thatcher, hero of today’s generation of Tory MPs, was forced out of office partly because of splits on European policy.

The next leader of the Conservative Party will face the same divisions, the same hatreds, the same men and women motivated by a noxious mix of misplaced patriotism and personal advancement.

In due course they will, at least in the early rounds, have a dizzying variety of candidates. Everyone from the newly promoted Penny Mordaunt and Rory Stewart to old timers such as David Davis and Michael Gove are touted as contenders.

Then there is Sajid Javid, Matt Hancock, Andrea Leadsom, Priti Patel, Amber Rudd, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Johnny Mercer, Liz Truss, Jo Johnson and even Ruth Davidson, who has ruled herself out and isn’t even an MP. There may be others. It is an unparalleled quantity of possible national leaders, though the quality is variable.

Few, apart from Boris Johnson, enjoy much recognition in the country at large, and there is no obvious reason why any of them would make a vastly better job of things than Ms May, or have more prospect of solving the Brexit conundrum, or of winning a general election.

Paradoxically, never, in the field of politics, have so many sought such a chalice as badly poisoned as the Tory leadership and the British premiership as they stand today. Why, it is even possible that they might make things worse than Ms May managed to. The public, in the meantime, can only watch and stare as the Tory charnel house fills up with the remains of once proud ambitions.