The long Conservative leadership contest is at last in the final straight. On Saturday, we’ll find out whether Kemi Badenoch or Robert Jenrick is going to shoulder the extraordinary challenge of rebuilding the party from one of its most shattering election defeats.

While the contest has been running since August, it feels as though we’ve had barely any time to really focus on this final choice. The 1922 Committee allocated only three weeks between the final round of MP voting and the close of polls for the membership vote – and with ballots arriving a week into that period, the real campaign was probably even shorter.

This was almost certainly deliberate. One of the party’s priorities has been avoiding a repeat of 2022, when Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss spent weeks taking lumps out of each other. Keeping multiple candidates in the race as long as possible made it easier for them to stay positive. But however understandable these decisions were from a party management perspective, they have come at an obvious cost to the democratic process.

It would have made far more sense, for example, for MPs to get their voting out of the way before the party conference; not just because MPs have presumably had plenty of opportunities to get to know the candidates already, but to avoid the very thing that........

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