What happens next is outlandish. About 100,000 of an ageing tribe, whose party scraped a derisory 9% in the European elections, are about to choose the next prime minister for all the rest of the UK’s 46 million voters. The Conservative party, which likes to call itself “the most successful party in the western world”, is now funded more lavishly by the legacies of its dead members than by its living ones. The keys to Downing Street have been handed on before in this high-handed monarchical manner without an election, but that doesn’t make it any less disgracefully undemocratic, as with so much of our failing constitution. Avoiding the legitimacy of election did Gordon Brown no good at all, giving him the hunted air of an insecure Richard the Third-ish usurper. The success of both the Brexit party and the Liberal Democrats’ “Bollocks to Brexit” riposte has obliterated the illusions of middle-ground, fence-sitting compromisers. Tory fears of the Nigel Farage surge will make it all the more likely that the crown falls into Boris Johnson’s incapable hands. The new prime minister’s lack of legitimacy will be a serious weakness, after the party scored its lowest vote since 1832. That abysmal…