Take it from me: leadership challenges are the beginning of the end. Barely twelve months after Conservative feuding led to one of their biggest defeats in electoral history, the Labour party have listened, watched, reflected – and seemingly learnt zero lessons.

Many arguments have been made as to why the Tories collapsed last year. Doomed flights to Rwanda, the rise of Reform, a high tax burden and prisons close to bursting have all been mooted. But as someone who worked in Downing Street across three administrations, the real reason stems from chronic divisions within the Conservative party: fourteen years of vacillating philosophies and rampant tribalism that manifested in not just daily displays of disunity, but all-too-frequent changes in leadership.

It is important to recognise how we ended up in this situation. Short-termism has grown over the last decade to fundamentally alter how our political culture functions in this country – with rancorous division and bitter infighting now almost engineered into the DNA of our governing classes. It has become individual first, party second, country third.

Take the rise of party factionalism. Loyalty under one single party banner began to fray for the Tories ahead of the Brexit referendum, with Downing Street explicitly authorising MPs from their own party to campaign against the incumbent prime minister on such an existential issue. Notwithstanding where one stands on the European Union, it precipitated the rise of innumerable party factions – Brexit, Remain, New Conservative, Red Wall, Blue Wall, Spartan, Wet. This hobbled the merry-go-round of successive prime ministers from David Cameron onwards, and ultimately proved fatal to Rishi Sunak’s efforts to keep his party united behind a single, coherent brand.

Leadership elections are both incredibly divisive and an........

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