Once again, 357-odd Conservative MPs have complete control over what happens next in this country. There are three questions that each of them will be urgently considering. One is: what’s best for the country? The second is: what’s best for the Conservative party? The third is: what’s best for me personally? It will not have escaped the attentive student of recent Tory politics that these things do not always point in quite the same direction.

So, question one. The country, poll after poll now tells us, wants rid of the whole shower of these blue-rosetted bozos as soon as is humanly possible. It seems to follow from that – even if the rules allow you to dodge it – that calling a general election would be the right thing to do for the good of the country. Unless you take the high-handed view that the country doesn’t know what’s good for it and is safest not being consulted, it’s rather hard to argue against this case. It’s especially hard to argue, if you’re the party that has just crashed the economy into a brick wall, that the people who know better are you.

That wasn’t true in 2019. We, as a country, liked Boris Johnson’s conservative party. We, as a country, voted for him and his manifesto. Those of us who knew him had our doubts as to his reliability, but there was no arguing with an eighty-seat majority. He had a solid mandate, as Nadine Dorries still likes to point out. But quite a lot of water has flown under the bridge between then and now, and that water has been full of corpses and untreated sewage. I don’t think, even at his most boosterish, Boris – who has now dropped out of the Tory leadership race – would care to put that long-ago mandate to the test of another election.

So it’s clear that questions two and three are the ones currently weighing on minds. Here, the two things at least superficially seem to point in the same direction. The good of the Conservative party, it seems obvious, is not much served by voluntarily undergoing a general election which will return them a double-digit number of seats. And the personal good of Crispin Red-Trouser MP is not much served by losing his job just as the economy’s in the toilet and his mortgage is shooting up. Wouldn’t it, he’ll be tempted to think, be better all round to put off the election as long as possible?

I think that analysis, as well as being cowardly, is wrong. Why, you may ask incidentally, is it any of my business, being as how I’m a metropolitan liberal of the sort the party has for the last six years thrived by defining itself against? Well, the obvious reason is that it’s everybody’s business. The identity of our next prime minister affects all of us. The last one – sprung on us in this case not by elected Tory MPs, who mostly knew she’d be a disaster, but by a pay-to-play selectorate of members of the Conservative party — has made very many of us a good deal poorer. We might not have a vote, but we’re entitled to take an interest.

The marginally less obvious reason is that the likes of me may not have a vote in this process, but we are going to have a vote sooner or later. Old Crispin, and many like him, are heading for the Jobcentre Plus as soon as we do. If the party is to survive, even as a tendril of new growth poking out of the ashes of the forest fire of a general election, it will sooner or later need to make itself agreeable to people like us. People who may not be traditional conservatives but have conservative friends and colleagues, who think ‘Never Kissed A Tory’ t-shirts are idiotic, who really can’t get all that exercised about gender-neutral toilets, but who can see the point of sound money, cultural continuity, caution and compromise. After the abject failure, the generational failure, of Trussism to be embraced even by the markets it was supposed to please, there’s no future for the party in reality-resistant purity spirals.

I don’t say this in a spirit of triumph. I don’t think there’s anything to celebrate in the prospect of a multi-term Labour government with no plausible, effective, intellectually rigorous opposition. And here is where, it seems to me, the interests of the country and the interests of the Tory party are in closer alignment than it looks. Indeed, the interests of constituency MPs of good conscience may also go the same way. The public rage that they so fear is largely directed against the squabbling, factional, ideologically demented and nakedly self-interested leadership.

If enough backbenchers were to say: you know what, let’s rip the plaster off and put our voices very publicly behind a general election, they might not fare so very badly in that election. They would at least be able to hold their heads up and look their constituents in the eye. And the public would recognise that the fish might be rotting from the head down, but that the rot has not after all reached the tail.

The intellectual spirit that made Conservatism so successful – its suspicion of grand schemes, its resistance to radicalism, its instinct that if there’s a fence here it might be here for a reason, its willingness to compromise with its enemies to hold on to power – still exists. But it no longer has anything like the whip-hand. There are still Tories in the party with whom centrists can do business. But what Malcolm Muggeridge called the ‘dawnists’ have taken over. And the people who have reached the top of the party – thanks in large part to two successive PMs prioritising dumb loyalty over ability – are, with a very few exceptions, beyond help. They have come to incarnate the toxicity of the Tory brand.

Sure, perhaps another year and a half with a halfway sensible prime minister might pull the poll ratings up a bit and save a few more Crispins from the chop. But it’s not going to turn anything fundamental around. Even sensible-seeming Rishi Sunak, even personable Penny, are tainted by association – and they will inherit a horrorshow of a national situation over which they will struggle to gain any semblance of control. The next election, whenever it comes, is going to wipe out a generation of senior Tories. That’s if you’re lucky. More drama – another year and a half of bald men fighting over a comb under a guillotine, so to speak – will toxify the brand still further: you’ll have even further to climb back up.

These are difficult times, so why not cut your losses and give Keir Starmer his wish? Accede to a general election. Take your lumps. Watch the lunatics and chancers vanish from memory. Enjoy the carrion comfort of seeing Sir Keir coming unstuck, as he is bound to. And meanwhile set about rebuilding the party from the ground up. It’s not only the honourable thing to do: it’s the pragmatic thing.