The world's oldest party is in crisis – and we might just be sitting at its deathbed

With friends like Mel Stride, Kemi Badenoch does not need any more enemies.

- Andrew Rawnsley

For those of you who may be understandably fuzzy about the composition of the Tory team, Sir Mel Stride is the shadow chancellor and the second most important personage in the Conservative hierarchy. Commenting about his embattled leader, he compared her struggles to be taken seriously with those faced by Margaret Thatcher in her first year as opposition leader and suggested that: “She will get better through time. At the media she will get better through time and at the dispatch box.”

Long gone are the days when anyone could say that “loyalty is the Tory party’s secret weapon”. As it happens, I think the shadow chancellor was genuinely trying to be helpful, but the effect of his remarks was to underline why so many Conservative MPs are in despair. Mrs Badenoch isn’t performing effectively on the media, she rarely lays a glove on the prime minister at PMQs, and she has squandered the love of the activists who gave her the leadership. They now place her bottom of the shadow cabinet league table.

She’s the flop of their pops. Arguing that she needs to be given time to improve puts the finger on one of her biggest problems. “Mrs Badenough”, as she is known to her crueller internal critics, is running out of road. She has been leading her party for more than six months and its fortunes have become palpably more dire. No one sensible thought it an easy job to relaunch the Tories after the most catastrophic general election defeat in their long history, but few Conservative MPs anticipated plunging into ever inkier depths of unpopularity.