Hancock is not the only Conservative politician to end the leadership contest with his credibility reduced. (Through an adviser, I asked for an interview with Hancock, but did not get a response.) Amber Rudd, the Work and Pensions secretary, was once a forceful Remainer. She delivered one of the referendum campaign’s most stinging attacks on Boris Johnson, joking in a debate that she wouldn’t trust him to drive her home. Yet she has also flipped, telling the BBC that she would now stay in the cabinet even if it became government policy to contemplate leaving the European Union without an exit deal—something many of her colleagues believe would be an economic disaster. Rudd was rewarded a day later with praise from Johnson, who said he was a “big fan.”

Perhaps the whiplash speed of this repositioning is not immediately apparent. Only three years ago, Remainers like Rudd and Hancock argued that leaving the EU at all would make Britain poorer and less safe. Now they are publicly embracing a leader who is prepared to sever decades of intelligence, trade, immigration, and political ties overnight, with no real plan for how to replace them.

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Hancock, at least, seems aware of the absurdity. At a meeting of the moderate Tory Reform Group, he admitted that the contest had been a “political rollercoaster.” He maintained he was “a reforming, centrist Conservative,” according to Politico, but he had “two sets of collective responsibility ... one to the government and the other to the Johnson campaign. And if any of you have seen my recent media performance, it causes some challenges.”

Outriders are not a new phenomenon. Political leaders around the world have long relied on surrogates—ministers, friendly backbenchers, and trusty columnists—to advance their ideas. But the contortions of Hancock and Co. go beyond that. “This does feel like very new territory for a leadership contest,” Catherine Haddon, a historian at the nonpartisan Institute for Government think tank, told me. “It seems to be a different order.”

We can attribute some of this to Johnson’s own vagueness and hatred of commitment. He notoriously wrote draft columns backing both Remain and Leave for The Daily Telegraph, before deciding which argument he found more compelling. Haddon finds it striking how often Johnson’s supporters are at a loss to explain his policy positions. It reminds her of when ministers are doing a live radio or television interview and an unrelated news story “blows up, and they find themselves having to cope and wing their way through it.”

Johnson’s pitch is essentially a populist one: Don’t listen to all these pessimists; Brexit is actually very simple. Bulldog spirit is a substitute for compromise and careful negotiation. It is hard for this approach to survive contact with the reality of government. “If you have this charismatic model of leadership, you can’t expose it to too much daylight,” says Robert Saunders, a senior lecturer in modern British history at London’s Queen Mary University. “Someone else has to take the fire.”