A divided Tory party is choosing its new leader and the United Kingdom’s new prime minister. It will not be easy to dispel the ambiguity that has marked the Johnson years

It did not take very long, after the end came, after the relief that – at last! – what will surely come to be seen as the most discredited government is modern history is finally over, for the consensus of political opinion outside the Conservative Party to recognise that the main question in British politics now is not who replaces Boris Johnson, but what replaces him.

I draw a distinction between the view of the world at large and that within the Conservative Party because they are different. The interest of the latter is easily expressed: Tory party members and MPs are looking for a new leader to take over as prime minister who can restore the party’s tattered public profile sufficiently for it to win the next general election. The rest of the world (as our editorial asserts today) wants something much more complex, yet which should not be impossible to achieve: a prime minister of the United Kingdom who is reasonable, truthful, honest and can be trusted to act with integrity. Those were the distinctions for the job identified this week by Sir Peter Riddell, the former Commissioner for Public Appointments, the man who tried with increasing difficulty to make sure the right people were given the right posts during most of Johnson’s terms of office and who thus knows what he is talking about – not least because he is all of those things himself.