HOWEVER ambitious you are and desperate to get your hands on the top job, becoming Prime Minister at this particular moment must be like being handed a poisoned chalice.

There are profound international difficulties, with a war that could explode at any moment into an unprecedented threat and a world economy that is teetering on the brink of a once-in-a-century slowdown. There are equally profound home problems, with Liz Truss’s spectacularly unsuccessful and short-lived government having worsened Britain’s economic outlook and his own party, having got the taste for blood having terminated two prime ministers, unwilling to be led.

But at least the Tories have swiftly selected a new leader and, in our opinion, the man who should have been chosen in the summer.

There are real questions about legitimacy: can one party run through three leaders without checking with the country? It doesn’t look good, it leaves Mr Sunak weaker, but the answer is that it can – indeed, as Mr Sunak was elected by MPs sent by constituencies to Westminster to act on their behalf, perhaps he is more democratic than Ms Truss who was chosen by a handful of people who only had the vote because they had bought membership of a political party.

These questions should buck the Tories up. They have to unite behind Mr Sunak as he sips from the chalice, because if the poison proves fatal to him, it will also kill their party. There can be no fourth PM without an election, and that would let in Labour which appears united, stable and with a semblance of a thought-through plan – in other words, everything the Tories have not been in recent months.