Ah, Mr Burnham, come in, take a seat. Mr Streeting, good to see you. We’ll also be interviewing Mr Starmer, then Ms Rayner; Mr Farage and Mr Polanski come in this afternoon. So, this prime minister job: what are you in it for?

That’s how I would do it. The “what are you in it for?” question gets to the heart of personal ambition. Of course we all tell prospective employers that we are hard-working, able, conscientious and ambitious. But that last claim, in particular, needs to be followed up and tested a bit. Ambitious for what? Ambitious for whom?

This period in Westminster is being fuelled by naked ambition: either the desire to stay in office or the determination to get to the top. Politics – sometimes unfairly disparaged as “show business for ugly people” – does not always reveal humanity at its best. One way of looking at the disastrous catalogue of bad government we have endured for over a decade now is as an exercise in bad ambition running riot. As the author of Fair or Foul – The Lady Macbeth Guide to Ambition, able to view it all through that Shakespearean lens, I can say how that goes.

The rivals will use respectable-sounding language, invoking duty, public service and even honour. Some leading figures may........

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