One of the quaint superstitions of the moment is a belief that our political dysfunction has a ready solution. The government stumbles from one crisis to another but things will pick up once Liz Truss is gone. Rishi Sunak warned that she would fail and so he is best placed to succeed her. He will calm the markets and lead us back to growth. Tories tell themselves he might even be able to beat Labour next time.

Other Tories put their faith in Boris Johnson, not least Boris Johnson. His withdrawal will be greeted with relief by MPs but there are costs attached. Whatever mandate this government still has is his. He won the Red Wall. He is said to have delivered Brexit. He grasped the need for the Tories to spend money and be seen as patriotic and anti-woke, albeit only rhetorically. He was the candidate of those on the patrician left who recognised him as one of them and of the national conservatives who convinced themselves he was on their side. The only side Boris has ever been on is Boris’s.

Then there is Penny Mordaunt. She is the candidate of people who shouldn’t have a vote in a Conservative leadership election. Neither she nor Sunak can salvage the fortunes of the Conservative party, and truth be told nor could Boris. The Conservative party itself may not be salvageable. But it warrants more effort than this. Sunak is a Tory’s idea of a likeable Tory. He’s youngish, telegenic, and doesn’t look or sound like someone you might encounter at a meeting of your local Conservative association. These are all welcome qualities but they are insufficient to the times.

Britain is heading for recession and more low growth. Truss hoped to short-circuit this by borrowing and cutting taxes without showing her hand on spending. Sunak wants to tax and cut his way to prosperity. This makes him different to both Truss and Boris but not meaningfully so for the average voter. To the average voter, he is just another Tory who thinks austerity is the answer. He is George Osborne 2.0.

That he, like Osborne, is urbane and progressive might impress a certain kind of Conservative, but to the country an axeman with a Peloton is still an axeman. The Coalition’s austerity programme already stripped away much from the social safety net. Another round will spread the pain more widely and more people will feel it this time. The short-to-medium term outlook for this economy is rising unemployment, including among graduates, professionals and the sorts of people who never thought they would end up here. Some will experience the welfare system for the first time and see for themselves how threadbare it is. These demographics, already peeling away from the Tories in the wake of Brexit, may break decisively and permanently with the party.

That makes it all the more imperative that the Tories solidify their new blue collar coalition. The ascendancy of Sunak’s balance sheet conservatism couldn’t come at a worse time. Rhetoric about living within your means is hard enough to hear without hearing it from a man who lives within £3,500 suits. Like Truss, Sunak sees conservatism in entirely liberal terms, as a philosophy of assuaging the market and balancing the books. He shows no sign of appreciating the need for a conservatism rooted in the common good, patriotism and sodality. Conservatism is about place and belonging but all Sunak offers is the opportunity to belong to a deficit reduction programme with a national anthem.

It is no longer the 1980s. No one remembers who shot JR and Thatcherism has gone out of fashion more brutally than shoulder pads. Preaching market dogma, spending cuts and a shrinking state to a country where people could soon be losing their jobs and homes is neither politically sound nor terribly conservative.

National conservatives want a party that is more than the political wing of a City that hates them. Some of them wonder whether the answer might lie outwith the Tory party. Nigel Farage has pronounced that institution ‘dead’ and claimed ‘the space is opening up for a new centre-right political movement’. There would be scope, under proportional representation, for a patriotic populist party that was economically interventionist and culturally anti-woke. That party, incidentally, would not be led by Farage. He called Kwasi Kwarteng’s first and last fiscal statement the ‘best Conservative Budget since 1986’. For all his man-of-the-people posturing, Farage is a Thatcherite who still believes in the old religion. He is Liz Truss with a Union Jack.

The superstition that this is a crisis of the moment, and a mere political crisis at that, is not limited to the right. Sir Keir Starmer is a boringly reassuring figure at a time like this. He gives off dependable stepdad vibes, he tries too hard but he’d miss his five-a-side game to pick the kids up from taekwondo. What he lacks is guts and conviction. Like all members of the Labour soft left, his ideology is not socialism but sentimentalism.

He’s happy to shunt a few mad Corbynistas out the door but he lacks the moral fortitude and intellectual backbone to take on and defeat the identitarian progressives rapidly capturing his party. His entry into Number 10 may bring stability and perhaps even competence to Whitehall but it would also bring hordes of wokery to every nook and cranny of government, from where they would inflict their political pathologies on every aspect of policy.

Green-haired sociopaths would be the least of his problems. The UK’s economic model no longer works and while Labour is slightly ahead of the Tories in understanding that, there is little evidence that Sir Keir either has the answers or could sell them to the British public. How do you tell voters that their affinity for public services and aversion to higher taxation makes current spending levels unsustainable?

What do you say to an ageing population that receives £114 billion every year in state pension and other benefits but will not countenance contributing to their own social care? What do you say to the generation that is picking up the tab? A lack of affordable housing, the eye-watering cost of raising children, static career opportunities, and the loss of free movement mean some under 40s would be better off emigrating. Soon enough, they will.

These are merely the economic and social problems. There is also the small matter of the UK falling apart at the seams. In Scotland, devolution has created a powerful proto-state from which the SNP daily chips away at the Union. Nicola Sturgeon may never deliver the referendum she keeps promising but her every vow comes with more grievance-stoking rhetoric. Whenever she finally goes, the anger and resentment she has stirred up will not go with her, and her successor might not be so skilled at controlling it.

At Westminster, the possibility of Northern Ireland being annexed to an Irish nationalist state is somehow both over- and under-hyped. It is not, in fact, a matter of demographics being destiny. The fastest-growing constituency in Northern Ireland are the post-sectarians, people with only childhood memories of the Troubles and who are in the process of forming a new national identity that is neither wholly nationalist nor unionist but distinctively Northern Irish. The much bigger threat is the Protocol and the political mindset that allowed the Protocol to happen, that melange of ignorant neglect and London-knows-best high-handedness that has always gone down so well across the Irish Sea.

That’s the trouble with all the fretting about Britain in decline: everything is so much worse than you think. The Tory leadership election is a creature of the crisis, it is not a solution to it. Britain feels like a country that no longer works. A new Tory leader is not going to fix that and nor is a new government. A foreboding thought occurs: maybe it can’t be fixed.