Rishi Sunak now looks set to become prime minister, assuming Penny Mordaunt either doesn’t find 100 MPs to nominate her or decides not to run if she does. He could, in theory, go straight from the 2pm meeting for Tory votes (if they happen) to Buckingham Palace to meet the King. It has all happened at such speed that there may need to be a couple of days for things to settle down before he moves to No. 10, with Liz Truss barely having had time to unpack. Or it could go to the members and end up mired in a long fuss about the legitimacy of online voting. But for the last few days and weeks, the political news and outlook has been unremittingly grim. So this may be a window to consider the case for hope.

• At a time when market-literacy is at a premium, we’d have the most market-literate PM in history. Sunak has a clearer grasp of finance than anyone to sit in No. 10 or No. 11. Gordon Brown was regarded as a details man because he read original academic papers. Sunak had a Bloomberg terminal on his desk to follow the metrics from which such papers are drawn. Treasury officials make the same joke about him: no matter how detailed the briefing, he’s more on top of the issue than they are. We need that right now.
• Sunak was ill-suited to campaigning because he likes to under-promise and over-deliver. But we also need a bit of that after unfulfilled hype of recent months.
• Almost alone in the cabinet, Sunak genuinely fought lockdown. He lost, but he fought – and gave a candid interview to The Spectator about that fight. No one else would have given an interview like that because no one else fought it. He is one to recognise and (if necessary) make a one-man fight against wrong received wisdom: he not only has the mental tools to defy a wrong orthodoxy but the willingness to use them. We need that now.
• As I argued in last week’s Daily Telegraph, this means he can have fewer tax hikes than Jeremy Hunt was planning for in his (hopefully soon-to-be-cancelled) 31 October Halloween budget. Hunt was putting together a fiscal tightening package of some 1.4 per cent of GDP from a panicked sense of what ‘the markets’ want. Neither Hunt nor Liz Truss had a clue what they wanted, and were in danger of an over-reaction. Sunak won’t treat the markets like a Roman god who demands sacrifices: he understands it’s a matter of reassurance through competence. That can be done without too many tax hikes that deepen a recession and make the whole problem worse.
• He’s organisationally highly competent: the opposite of blustering Boris and accident-prone Truss. He thinks through government policies, implementation and likely reaction and actually pioneered new schemes in HMT (furlough, eat out to help out) which were operational successes (even if you disagree with them).
• Sunak in the end realised his furlough scheme backfired as the over-50s weren’t coming back to work, blowing a massive hole in the labour market and slowing growth. Truss was babbling about record low employment: that’s a fake figure only valid if you ignore various other forms of unemployment. Some 13 per cent of working-age Brits are claiming out-of-work benefits: Sunak realises this is a scandal. Whether he’ll push through the radical welfare reform needed to remedy this is another question but at least he knows the problem.

One thing I don’t mention above: if Sunak does become PM, he’ll be the first non-white leader in Britain. But it won’t be an Obama moment because Britain is not obsessed about race: which is one of the best things about this country. Race has not been an issue in his campaign; Britain doesn’t think in those terms. Diwali, a five-day festival of light for Hindus and Sikhs, started on Saturday. It’s quite conceivable that Sunak, a practising Hindu, will soon be lighting candles for Diwali outside No. 10 (as he did outside No11) sending a powerful message about Britain’s status as Europe’s most successful melting pot. And a message about the success of the project of the United Kingdom. If he does end up lighting those candles, it’s worth asking: in how many countries would such a scene be possible? We live in amazing country, and now and again their are moments where it’s okay to remind ourselves of that.

Now, does all of the above mean I think his premiership is a guaranteed triumph? No: his windfall taxes and his decision to break the manifesto pledge on tax rises displayed a worrying inconsistency. During the summer campaign, he often conveyed a certain fatalism that seemed inconsistent with the more radical, orthodoxy-defying figure I had thought him to be. Most choices ahead of him are awful ones. So I’m unsure which Rishi we’d get. But either would be a vast improvement on Truss’s attempt at the premiership.

We’ll know by 2.05pm if we’re seeing a fight or a coronation (I reckon it will be five minutes after the meeting of Tory MPs starts for Graham Brady to say which). But given how badly the Truss project was going, it’s good to see no time being lost in turning the page.