In just over a week, Britain will have a new prime minister. No one can say that the 160,000 or so Conservative party members who will have made the choice have been deprived of exposure to the two candidates. The leadership race has dragged on for longer than a general election campaign, with endless televised hustings and public appearances. The process is supposed to be a training ground, testing candidates on their answers to all the toughest questions that will confront them in government. But in this respect it has failed.

High tax is a symptom of a wider problem: big spending. Unless spending changes, any tax cut will be temporary. Yet there has been very little acknowledgment from the candidates that government has grown out of all proportion to its usefulness. Tories seem hellbent on making the problem ever worse. Boris Johnson’s plan to subsidise care homes for wealthier pensioners is an unaffordable folly, yet both Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak support the idea, and have doubled down on it throughout the campaign.

Both would keep the ‘net zero’ target which will only compound the energy security crisis we are now facing. Technology, science and the free market together are working wonders. Britain’s use of energy peaked in 2001 and has since fallen by almost 30 per cent – helped by the use of more efficient devices– despite the fact that our population and economy have grown. The fallacy that a green Britain can only come via the taxman and by government edict is demonstrable and unaffordable nonsense.

Then there is the welfare state. It was designed as a safety net for people in hard times to help them back to work. But a third of all British households are now in receipt of means-tested benefits. Suella Braverman started talking about this in her campaign, but when she fell out of the race, so too did the welfare debate.

A serious leadership contest would have meant that every prospective prime minister would have been asked: do we really want a welfare state of this size? If this is to be the new normal, then we must accept the highest taxes since the 1950s and dispense with the idea of the Tories being a low-tax party.

Sunak has come close to doing this, saying that if he was prime minister then he’d be able to reverse only half of his tax rises over seven years. It’s a depressing conclusion but it is at least honest. Truss is more ambitious, but it’s far from clear that she’s willing to make the changes (cuts and huge supply-side reforms) that fulfilling her ambitions would require. If she isn’t, her premiership will not last long. She’ll be finished off by the markets, by the voters, or both.

The National Health Service is in full-blown crisis even before winter. Too much top-down bureaucratic management has crippled it, and it is now tipping over into an emergency. Professor Joe Harrison, who runs the Milton Keynes University Hospital NHS Trust, put it well when he said: ‘We’re in danger of all sitting around the campfire singing “kumbaya” as the Titanic sinks. We are presiding over a failing NHS. There’s no question about it.’

In a few years, nearly 45 per cent of day-to-day public service spending will go on the NHS. It could be that both Sunak and Truss imagine this is unfixable, concluding that the only option is to talk loosely about reform and, as Prof Harrison puts it, watch the Titanic sink. But if the NHS goes down, it will take the Tory government with it.

As for pensions, both candidates have meekly committed themselves to the ruinously expensive ‘triple lock’. Not only does this threaten the public finances, it is (like the care homes subsidy policy) a source of inter-generational unfairness. Its existence is also going to make it much harder to rebuff the many trade unions who are threatening to generate a de facto national strike this autumn in protest at below-inflation wage rises. If you can’t see the danger in an inflation–linked upward spiral for pensions, how can you hope to persuade the unions?

The younger generation urgently needs affordable housing. Truss and Sunak were questioned many times over housing policy, but to little avail. Truss, who previously wanted to build more homes on the green belt, has baulked at the thought of upsetting Conservative party members in the Home Counties. Sunak put on a Barbour jacket and spoke about protecting the green belt – though it is not under any threat. The message the Tories need to be persuaded of is quite different from that offered by Sunak and Truss. The success of a property–owning democracy depends on property owners, and that in turn depends on building. Nimbyism will lead the Tories into a political grave.

This leadership contest has been more of a holiday from reality than a preparation for office. It has been a kind of mobile Tory party conference, with everyone avoiding the most important subjects. Perhaps both Truss and Sunak do have radical, credible and far-reaching ideas on how to rejuvenate Britain. If so, it is frustrating that they have not shared them during the long campaign.