IIs the Tory leadership battle about to get interesting? This question assumes you haven’t been waiting all summer to see if Mel Stride will overtake Kemi Badenoch in the race for the poisoned chalice. Most people have probably been thinking more about the Liberal Democrats than the Tories recently. But that could change.

It has not been much of an election campaign so far. One reason is that candidates are largely travelling around the country holding private campaign events with their members and speaking to local associations. This has the advantage of taking place behind closed doors – an advantage felt both by the candidates, who can speak more freely, and by the press, who do not have to listen to the same stock phrases adapted for an audience in Devon and then in Sunderland on consecutive days. Another is that candidates are prohibited from personally attacking each other under the new “yellow card” system, designed to prevent the campaign from drifting into the kind of public bickering that cost the party the general election.

The problem with the yellow card system is that the Conservatives have become so used to factional fighting and personal rivalries that they have forgotten how to argue about politics in a civilised way. They don’t know what to say. Badenoch has continued to devote her energies to attacking other people, especially journalists, who write anything unkind about her, while the rest just stumble around confused and pretend to be nice.

It would be wrong, however, to think that even a three-month leadership contest, forcing people to be polite to each other, will be enough to break years of habit. “We are far from the end of our internal bickering period,” says one former MP. “People still have a lot of dirty laundry to wash.” Some of it is personal, with various rivalries between individuals still unresolved. Much more of it is down to the fact that the party is no longer sure what it stands for. Badenoch, the current frontrunner, summed it up well during her own campaign when she said the party had been “unsure of who we are, what we stand for and how we could build a new country.” People who are uncomfortable in their own skin tend to be the meanest to others, and the same is true of political parties, which explains why the Conservatives have been so toxic of late.

Not all leadership positions have helped to clarify the situation. Tom Tugendhat, for example, is running largely as a centrist, but made the bizarre decision to talk about reforming the European Convention on Human Rights, or even leaving it if necessary. This angered some of his supporters who had supported him on the assumption that he was the candidate who would not take the party further in that direction. It also meant that the ECHR became a more prominent issue in the election campaign, which does not help him.

Other candidates have talked a lot about the need to “unite” the party, but without any real plan to do so. Both Priti Patel and James Cleverly are instinctively very loyal to the party and found it quite baffling how their colleagues have gone off track. Patel has found it hard to distance himself from the previous government’s record on big issues like net migration, while Cleverly is an almost compulsive optimist who seems to hope the party will come together after a good speech. All of the candidates are oddly fixated on whether they would give Boris Johnson a cabinet post if he is re-elected to Parliament. Robert Jenrick has said he would be “happy” to offer a hypothetical post to what is currently a highly hypothetical MP. Stride tried to dodge the question entirely, or to explain why he couldn’t just say “yes” or “no”. The reason is that a direct answer risks alienating one half or the other of a party that candidates like him try to unite by pretending everyone can just get along if they avoid all the difficult issues, like a family Christmas where everyone watches TV so there isn’t a heated argument. But it shows that the party is still stuck in its past, trying to heal its old wounds rather than looking to the future.

This should come as no great surprise, given that years after Margaret Thatcher’s death there were Tory MPs who were tearful at the way her colleagues had pushed her out of office in 1990. Johnson’s time in office was much shorter, but he left a deep mark on the party, not least because he was not a true Conservative for many of his opponents and was part of the shift away from fiscal responsibility, respect for institutions and value of family. His supporters, meanwhile, remain convinced that he was the only person ever to successfully campaign for the Tory party.

If Boris is a matter of the past, then surely the question of the future is how the Conservative Party tackles both the Reform and Liberal Democrats without appearing even more sclerotic than it has of late. The campaign begins in the parliamentary recess, meaning Tory MPs have not had much time to get used to five Reform MPs pacing the House of Commons – or to how small their group feels now that it has just 121 members.

When Parliament reconvenes and MEPs begin to whittle down the six candidates to the four who will put their proposals to members at conference, things could get even more heated. But what would really give the contest momentum would be the prospect of the person who wins actually counting for something.

Every opposition leader is important, in the sense that they have an important constitutional job to do and will shape their party’s future in one way or another. But many Tories, including sitting MPs who have publicly supported a candidate, assume they are voting for the leader over the important leader, who will absorb more of the infighting, make a few modest reforms here and there, and largely try to stop Labour from creating a powerful narrative about a Conservative “black hole” and economic mismanagement. But the chances of that leader making it to the next election to fight that narrative on the campaign trail are relatively slim, let alone having any real chance of winning that election.

At least, those chances seemed slim at the start of the campaign. Given the financial constraints that will apply until Rachel Reeves achieves the economic growth she has staked everything on, there is no guarantee that Labour will make a successful use of its time in government. The honeymoon is already over and Keir Starmer’s approval ratings have collapsed in the polls. And that’s before the autumn budget, which is likely to anger many voters with more cuts, tax increases and scrapped spending programs, and frighten Labour MPs who are still facing the grim reality of being in government and having to choose between two things you don’t like.

The Conservative Party has until October 31 to choose its leader. The budget is due to be passed on October 30, by which time most members will have voted. But Labour already has some problems over the winter fuel payment and the cap on the two-child allowance. If Tory MPs and members start to think that this could be a Labour government in a term where everything goes horribly wrong, then the stakes will suddenly be a lot higher than voting for a candidate who makes a reasonable first attempt in opposition. And candidates will start to believe that even if they don’t win this time, they might have a better chance next time, just as Rishi Sunak stuck it out to the end in his first Tory leadership race against Liz Truss because he felt he might run again at some point.

That first leadership contest seemed so long that most in the Conservative Party were convinced they could not endure another ordeal of that length. Yet just two years later, the party is trudging through an even longer ordeal. Having not yet figured out how to argue properly, it may take another long round of campaign rallies and yellow cards before the bad habits of recent years are broken.