Several weeks of Conservative leadership hustings and associated TV shows are now, barring a final event on Wednesday, finally over. So what have we learned about Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt during this electoral marathon?

Neither has shown a huge grasp of difficult details

Johnson’s broad-brush approach is well known and arguably part of his appeal, and he coasted through most hustings events gaining applause by appealing for optimism and a can-do attitude. It did cost him in more forensic settings, such as Andrew Neil’s exposure of Johnson’s limited grasp of possible post-Brexit tariff regimes.

While Hunt’s pitch to members was more technocratic, the substance was often similarly thin, especially on how he would produce a rapid new Brexit deal. The hustings in Belfast was notable: any audience member hoping for clues on exactly how either candidate would prevent a hard Irish border would have left disappointed.

Neither yet has a definable political philosophy or a grand vision

The process brought a rash of policy proposals from both men, but these were mainly reactive and straightforward – tax cuts or more spending in popular areas. Anyone scouring for a sense of what Johnsonism or Huntism might involve as a prime ministerial credo would be none the wiser.

Similarly, it would have been hard to guess that the UK faces a series of intricate, pressing political and social problems which are not Brexit: everything from the collapsing social care system to the growing climate crisis to the uncertain future of work in a mechanised age. These subjects were aired, but little was said beyond platitudes.

Leadership campaigns are often about glossing over difficult problems. But the lack of vision, even of political curiosity, was striking, and Brexit cannot be blamed for all of it.

Austerity is well and truly over

Or at least it will be should either candidate actually deliver on the many tax and spending promises they lavished about during the campaign – by no means a foregone conclusion, especially in a hung parliament.

Either way the largesse of the candidates’ promises was striking, with both resorting almost daily to hypothetical raids on the £26bn or so “fiscal headroom” built up by Philip Hammond, as if it was cash found down the back of the sofa rather than extra borrowing. Both pledged significant tax cuts, as well as significantly increased spending on everything from schools to police and defence.

Perhaps the epitome came during the Yorkshire and Humber hustings at the start of the month, when Johnson promised to spend the £39bn “divorce settlement” if a no-deal Brexit ate up the fiscal headroom, then seemed to promise he would be somehow able to spend them both. This was incoherent, fiscally incontinent stuff.

Having party members select leaders is not always a good idea

Earlier in the month the Tory grandee Ken Clarke argued that internal democracy had ruined both Labour and the Conservatives. He was only half-joking. Clarke’s point is that while MPs might reflect a fairly consensual view of constituency opinion, members tend to represent the most robust end of opinion in a party.

The hustings demonstrated this phenomenon. Having to appeal to 140,000 or so predominantly ultra-Brexit, low-tax, low-regulation voters, rather than the wider electorate, meant neither Johnson or Hunt had any incentive to temper their messages, which were nudged down the policy slipway as the process went on.

Arguably the culmination was Monday evening, when both Johnson and Hunt said that even a reformed Irish backstop could not be tolerated and the EU would have to ditch the entire idea – thus committing both men, in effect, to pushing for a no-deal Brexit. Of course, policy positions can be wound back once inside No 10, but when hustings are televised, recorded and tweeted, this is much harder to do.

Hustings should only be listened to once

In the era before livestreaming, this was precisely what happened – for the most part the only people who heard what was said at a particular hustings event were the regional members and assorted media in the room.

But amid huge interest in the battle, each event was pored over, with one quick lesson soon emerging – both Hunt and Johnson basically made the same pitches each time and, for the most part, repeated listenings soon became tedious.

Thus we learned that Hunt is congenitally incapable of speaking for more than about 40 seconds without mentioning that he set up a business; similarly, it became very clear early on that Johnson much prefers to talk about his time as London mayor than his more recent stint as foreign secretary.

After a few events it even became possible to track several minutes in advance the trajectory of Johnson’s laborious jokes, such as a regular, groan-inducing line about not having to worry about dairy goods shortages in a no-deal Brexit because “where there’s a will there’s a whey”.