What a funny country this is, and what funny political parties it has. Both appear to be more or less mad, as if designed by Lewis Carroll for a larger-than-original Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.

The governing party has just lost its leader because a majority of voters rejected his principal policy, British membership of the EU. It has loopily replaced him with a successor who *also* favours British membership of the EU.

In doing so, it has perhaps accidentally avoided a vote in which someone else might have been picked.

The Labour Party is embarking on a leadership struggle between its old-fashioned left-wing members and its fashionably Blairite MPs, who barely speak the same language. Bizarrely, the week after Labour’s Iraq War was shown definitively to have been a colossal and inexcusable mistake, the supposed standard-bearer of common sense, rectitude and goodness is a Labour MP. A Ms Eagle, who voted for the Iraq war at the time (when the average Natterjack Toad could have seen it was a daft idea) and repeatedly voted against any investigation of it later.

She is, however, an accomplished producer of clichés, as she showed at her campaign launch. What she stands for, apart from stupid wars, it is very hard to see.

Ms Eagle's main task will apparently be splitting her party down the middle, possibly aided by lots of lawyers, and I can only wish her the best of British luck with that.

Mrs May's main task will be leaving the EU, a policy she disagrees with and campaigned (rather feebly) against, perhaps hoping nobody would notice (they did, Theresa, they did).

Thus, they have picked a leader who actively disagrees with her own government’s main and central task. Almost every significant policy decision from now on is affected by the EU question. How can this possibly be sensible?

One has to ask why Mr Cameron bothered to resign, if this is the best they can do.

And thus Mrs Theresa May, who appears to have been elevated to her new eminence largely by ‘The Times’ newspaper, will shortly go to Buckingham Palace to see the Queen, before she formally assumes her duties.

It appears that the interview with Mrs Andrea Leadsom, which appeared in ‘The Times’ on Saturday ....(I have been struggling since to find any quotation from Mrs Leadsom which justifies the headline : ‘Being a mother gives me edge on May — Leadsom’ . I mean, I cannot find any words from her which contain this sentiment, which seems to me to be a problem given that it is so stated in the splash headline).... seems to have frightened Mrs Leadsom into giving up her campaign for the Tory leadership.

I am not especially keen on Mrs Leadsom, who doesn’t appear to be a social or moral conservative, and whose collapse on Monday suggests she lacks the stomach for a fight. But she might have done better than I or anyone expected. At the weekend I began to pick up signals that the Tory membership might be going to do to the Parliamentary Tory Party what the Labour membership have done to the Parliamentary Labour Party – choose a leader who was more loyal to the party’s aims than they were.

They may actually have been planning to vote for Mrs Leadsom. They would have done this on the very sound grounds that she supported the main task of the new post-Cameron government – taking Britain out of the EU. They may well have thought it ridiculous that, having ejected a pro-EU prime Minister, they then chose a pro-EU successor, who opposes her own government’s main aim.

Well, now they can’t. Mrs May, who I believe will be a grave disappointment in office to those who have become her cheerleaders, has thus escaped the possible danger of a grave humiliation. But she has also lost the chance of a proper unquestionable mandate from the Tory members, who are now free to mutter against her that they were never asked. Which they will, soon.

I will return to this in more detail later in the week.