As the Conservative Party is the most enduring and successful democratic political party in the entire world — and in the entire history of the world — we Brits (who pride ourselves on generally backing the under-dog) wouldn’t be human if we didn’t enjoy a bit of blood-letting between Honourable Members when it all goes pear-shaped. 

It’s not that the other parties are especially respectful of their leaders when electoral failure comes knocking and a shiny new shill-in-chief must be found. There was the unprecedented battle — unless one counts the Old Testament — in 2010 when two brothers, Ed and David Miliband, both put themselves up for the same throne; when Ed was elected leader of the Labour Party, David declined to serve under him, stepped down as an MP and moved to America.

There is, though, something particularly relentless and swift about the way the Tories put the boot in. Think of that famous photograph of Mrs. Thatcher being driven away from Downing Street for the final time with tears in her eyes, after being knifed by her own party when they decided that she was an electoral liability. Generally there’s just a brief but savage dust-up before the victor emerges, but what’s eye-catching about the current battle for leadership of the Conservatives is that the three front-runners are all of minority heritage, two of them women. 

At the fourth annual National Conservatism conference in Washington, D.C. last week, the former home secretary, Suella Braverman, lambasted the ex-prime minister, Rishi Sunak, for the capture of government institutions under his watch. This was understandable, but the bit where she said “I was a member of a government that presided over the mutilation of children in our hospitals” did not go down well at home.

Mrs. Braverman’s leadership rival, Kemi Badenoch, was apparently wielding a post-mortem scalpel of her own, having judged Mr. Sunak’s calling of an early election without informing his cabinet as being a mistake (again, understandably) and correctly noting his leaving of D-Day commemorations early as “disastrous.” This led the most senior Black Tory — the handsome and charmingly-named James Cleverly — to call somewhat belatedly for party unity.

He did so after Mrs. Braverman claimed that her critics were in “meltdown,” tweeting: “I’d be interested in knowing whether Kemi thinks I’m having a ‘very public nervous breakdown.’” For her part, Mrs. Badenoch appeared to stick by her remarks, X-ing back that there had been too much “nodding along” when the party was in government.

Mrs. Braverman has much to recommend her. Born Suella Fernandes — named after Sue Ellen Ewing from the soap opera “Dallas” — she is a socialist’s nightmare; as the daughter of two immigrants of Indian origin fleeing to London from Mauritius and Kenya, she learned early on that racism is not as simple as Black and white. It can be about Third World resentment of Indian success; it can be about the racism of liberals who loathe any immigrant who doesn’t wait around for the white establishment to assist him or her.

Her mother was a nurse, her father worked for a housing association, and she calls herself  “a child of the British Empire.” A libertarian in favor of strong boundaries, she is for women’s rights and controlled immigration; a Buddhist married to a Jew, she spoke out fearlessly against the growing political demands of British Muslims, in particular the pro-Hamas hate marches which have made Central London a no-go zone for Jews most weekends since the October 7 massacre. 

Yet (as someone said of Garbo’s stand-in Geraldine Dvorak) she has everything that Kemi has — except whatever it is that Kemi has. Paradoxically, she can go too far; her remark last year about homelessness often being “a lifestyle choice” was met with revulsion by organizations supporting British military veterans, street-sleeping among whom rose under the Conservative government. Though unfairly caricatured as “Suella De Vil” by the British press, it’s fair to say that she lacks the charm of Mrs. Badenoch, a mother of three who looks barely old enough to vote. 

Because Mrs. Badenoch is simply the best of our island race; born here, but raised in Nigeria where she did her homework by candlelight, it was so important to the teenage Olukemi Adegoke to be a true Brit that she returned here alone at the age of 16 to complete her education, working at McDonald’s in order to put herself through college.

Her maiden speech in 2017 described Brexit as “the greatest ever vote of confidence in the project of the United Kingdom”; listening to her, a poor betrayed post-hope Briton thinks of everything that always held us together, from the Blitz to the Beatles. We still “want to believe” — as the poster on Fox Mulder’s wall used to say — and Mrs. Badenoch takes us there. Beautiful, bold Mrs. Badenoch is going to look mighty appealing to a jaded electorate in four years time. 

I understand that in the interests of unity, we should make this a fast fight, and then let these two formidable women combine their differing talents in preparation for the forthcoming kerfuffle, which will take place when the gilt has well and truly worn off the gingerbread house of cards that Labour are currently constructing.

Though this spat may seem unseemly, to me it signifies the true diversity of the Conservative party; two women of color and a Black man (a YouGov poll for the Times just reported that Mr. Cleverly has overtaken both Mrs. Braverman and Mrs. Badenoch as favorite) vying for the job recently vacated by Britain’s first Hindu prime minister when Labour is, as ever, bossed by a pale male and seems likely to elect a female leader only if *she* has a penis. Even in dreary defeat, there’s something reckless and radical about the modern Conservative party. Let the games commence.