AS the author Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote in the Guardian recently, not even the Tories care who wins the contest to be the next Tory leader. With 121 MPs, it’s very unlikely that whoever is elected will get be a Tory prime minister.

The Tory leadership contest has now reached a halfway stage. After two ballots, six candidates have now been whittled down to four.

However, with such a small electorate and with each of the four attracting support, all we have really learnt so far is that the Tories are completely split over where to go for the future.

All the candidates have managed to come out with a range of outlandish hard- to far-right ideas. As a (Tory) Sunday Times journalist noted at the start of September, the first step in a Tory recovery is that they stop being “weird.”

So far that is not happening. The four remaining leadership candidates were all ministers in Liz Truss’s 49-day government: Robert Jenrick, Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat have offered no explanation on what they were doing there.

None of the four candidates was in Parliament before 2010 and so have no experience of opposition. Further, public recognition is low, with a fake candidate often doing well in opinion polls.

Does it matter? After all, Labour has a massive majority. It matters in the sense that parliamentary democracy requires a credible opposition which the Tories are not.

When Keir Starmer forced through the cut in winter fuel benefits for many pensioners, Tory opposition was muted, as he knew it would be. After all, what could a party that had just presided over 14 years of austerity and benefit cuts really have to say?

Opposition could come to an extent from Plaid Cymru, the SNP, Greens, left-wing independents and the Lib Dems, but while that might work on an issue-by-issue basis, the parties and groups involved have different social and class backgrounds.

While extraparliamentary opposition is often associated with the left, that is far from the case around the globe and even in Britain. It wasn’t until near the end of Tony Blair’s first term that far-right-inspired farmers took action, there were fuel protests and the Countryside Alliance was on the streets.

We can add to that now the fascist fragments that did much to inspire riots in early August. Politics in the age of social media moves faster.

If the Tories do want to sort themselves out they probably need something like Robert Peel’s Tamworth Manifesto (1834) issued after the party’s previous worse defeat in 1832. It recognised the need for the Tories to modernise, to be democratic (for the time) and appeal to a wider layer of people.

I don’t think there is a Peel among the current four leadership contenders, however. It’s worth remembering too that in his effort to change the Tories, Peel himself split the party over the Corn Laws in 1846.

A split is one of the possible outcomes of the leadership election. Suella Braverman or Priti Patel may defect to Reform UK, although given the racism of Nigel Farage’s limited company, it won’t be an easy passage.

Historically the Tories have assimilated splits rather than had them. In the 1880s, over home rule for Ireland, many Liberals joined the Tories and likewise over austerity with the national government in 1931.

It should be a good time for the left to organise politically, in the unions and communities. One way of looking at the birth of the Labour Party in 1900 is as an understanding that the existing system was not working for the have-nots. The crisis of the Tories and the “Treasury mind” politics of Labour provide opportunities.

Keith Flett is a socialist historian. Follow him on X @kmflett.