Rishi Sunak was meant to clean up the Tory party. Instead he will leave it morally and ideologically exhausted

In the dying days of Donald Trump’s presidency, the log fire in his chief of staff’s office was lit daily.

The outgoing team were frantically burning documents, or so the White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson writes in her memoir, to the point that her own boss’s wife reportedly complained that his suits smelled of smoke. Many alarming things happened in those final days, but the fall-of-Rome atmosphere is somehow captured in that whiff of bonfire. The paranoia; the panic; the queasy feeling of something very wrong at the heart of public life.