What are we to make of the Lee Anderson saga? The very fact that this low-rent furore is dominating our Sunday political discourse speaks volumes. At the end of a week which saw the Commons change its procedures in a bid to placate the threat posed by a mixed bag of Islamist and Corbynista pro-Palestine ultras, the political media has found a compelling talking point with which to divert our attention.

Rather than address the fundamental issue – that the Leader of the Opposition and the Commons Speaker gave ground to the mob – here we are agonising about whether Rishi Sunak acted swiftly or harshly enough against his most notorious backbench blowhard. Or perhaps whether he was too swift and too harsh. This reminds me of the big issue that came out of the Islamist assassination of Sir David Amess: not how we remove the cancer of this extremism from our society, but why MPs need to be kinder to each other and why hurtful words on social media should be banned.

This party no longer works as a vote-winning vehicle

Clearly Anderson was engaging in hyperbole when he told a GB News audience that both Sadiq Khan and Sir Keir Starmer were ‘controlled by Islamists’. And yet in the view of many of us, perhaps most of us, both men have failed adequately to confront the menace posed by them. His Khan-specific final remark (‘He’s actually given our capital city away to his mates’) did in my view amount to a slur.

And yet if Anderson loses the whip for it, why is Susan Hall still Conservative mayoral candidate after telling a gathering at the party’s annual conference that many in the Jewish community were frightened to be living in London ‘because of the divisive attitude of Sadiq Khan’? Hall’s intimation of mayoral anti-Semitism came just before the 7 October Hamas pogrom and the acute deterioration in the atmosphere on London’s streets that followed it. Just like Anderson, Hall refused either to withdraw her comment or apologise for it. How Sunak squares that circle in any forthcoming joint campaign appearances with her is down to him. Perhaps there won’t be any.

From the point of view of brute national electoral politics, the main lesson to be drawn from these Tory contortions is simply this: this party no longer works as a vote-winning vehicle. The longstanding idea of a ‘broad church’ Conservative party that can appeal to voters ranging from the hard or traditionalist right, through centrist liberals and all the way across to the progressive inside-left has broken down. Or rather, it has been broken by societal developments that demand coherent responses.

Some 40,000 Islamists on terror watch lists cannot be wished away. Thanks to the prevailing human rights and asylum system architecture, most of those that came from other countries cannot be pushed away either.

On this as on a string of other first order pathologies voters seek credible antidotes from united parties. Other issues include living standards stuck at base camp for a decade and a half, massively excessive immigration hollowing out social solidarity, rates of taxation which induce despair rather than igniting wealth-creating ‘animal spirits’, the bonds of collective affinity being splintered by the stoking of racial and other identity-linked grievances.

Yet the Tories are split down the middle between politicians in search of urgent and effective remedies and those, now clustered again in the most senior positions, who barely seem to have noticed that political challenges have changed since about 2007 and the ‘heir to Blair’ salad days of David Cameron and George Osborne.

Not only that, but this establishment Tory tendency is now aggressively turning on those urging a return to the conservatism of family, faith and flag. The Anderson furore was stoked in the main not by Labour – which is justifiably anxious about public perceptions as regards its dependency on Muslim votes – but by the ‘One Nation’ wing of the Tories: Lord Barwell, Lady Warsi, that soon-to-be jobseeker Sajid Javid.

Their pressure, public and private, switched the public debate away from the emerging question of whether Starmer had shown himself unfit to be prime minister. Back it went on to that favourite old chestnut of the political media about whether the Tories were engaged in an unconscionable ‘lurch to the Right’.

Another of their number, Sir Robert Buckland, even went on the radio this morning to demand that those who thought like Anderson should leave the party and join another. In one sense he is correct. These two tribes, so deeply divided about most of the main questions of our age, cannot co-exist within a single party. Or if they do then that party will not get anywhere near the levers of power.

The question is better framed around which faction should leave, which should keep the Conservative brand and whether it will be worth anything by the time the matter is settled. The Lee Anderson controversy is mere stormy weather. The disintegration of the Conservative party is real climate change.