What next for Boris? Who can unite the right and save the Tories now?

The vital, over-riding task of the next Conservative leader will be to reunite the Right. Sir Keir Starmer has won a landslide victory thanks in large part to the civil war raging between his opponents, with Nigel Farage at the head of Reform UK inflicting lethal damage on huge numbers of Conservative candidates who would otherwise have been elected.

To state the aim of unity is a million times easier than to achieve it, which is one reason why the Conservatives must not rush into their next leadership contest. There are no short cuts to electoral happiness for the Tories, especially as the nation will first wish, rightly, to give Starmer and his team a fair chance to show what they can or cannot do.

Anyone who aspires to become the next Tory leader must demonstrate that he or she has learned from the mistakes made by the party in recent years. Why did so many voters give up on the Conservatives? What went wrong?

This does not mean identifying the guilty men or women and taking them outside to be shot. To proceed like that will simply prolong the civil war on the Right and make voters who at this general election despaired of the Conservatives and turned instead to Reform conclude that they did the right thing.

There is absolutely nothing to be gained by pursuing a bitter blame game within the Tory Party, with different factions blaming each other for losing the election. That sort of self-indulgent squabbling will play into Starmer’s hands.

At the start of the general election campaign I reported for ConservativeHome from Hartlepool, three years ago the scene of one of the most astonishing electoral triumphs ever achieved by the Conservative Party, the capture of that seat from Labour by the largest by-election swing to an incumbent government since the Second World War.

Starmer as Leader of the Opposition visited Hartlepool three times during the by-election campaign and was unable to connect with anyone. Boris Johnson as Prime Minister went there three times and persuaded voters they could best express their rebelliousness, their angry feeling of being neglected by both main parties, by voting for the Conservatives led by him.

Johnson was the insurgent, the man who got Brexit done in defiance of the Establishment, and who in the run-up to the by-election got the vaccination programme done too.

It became blindingly obvious during my visit to Hartlepool that there was a vacancy in this general election campaign for an insurgent, and that neither Starmer nor Rishi Sunak had what it took to fill the gap.

No wonder Farage, one of nature’s insurgents, announced a few days later that he would be standing for Reform UK in Clacton, and helped make that party the protest movement of choice for about four million voters, including many readers of this newspaper.

In an article published on Friday evening Johnson made a thinly veiled pitch to become once more the Tory leader. If he wishes to be chosen, he too will have to show in the coming months that he has learned from the mistake of the past, including the mistakes which in the summer of 2022 led his own MPs to sack him.

But to quell Farage, and reunite the Right, a cautious Establishment figure will not do. A heavyweight who is also a free spirit will be required, and it is not immediately clear, as one glances through the brutally diminished list of Tory MPs, who apart from Johnson would fit the bill.

• Andrew Gimson is the author of Boris Johnson: The Rise and Fall of a Troublemaker at Number 10 (Simon & Schuster, £12.99).