Andrea Leadsom just bowed out of the race to be Prime Minister, in what was surely the most statesmanlike move in British politics in months.
Leadsom put the national interest at the centre of her explanation, leaving personal ambition by the wayside.
She said she was withdrawing to give businesses, and the nation, “certainty”, and also to avoid a damaging Tory split between her 84 backers in the parliamentary party, and everybody else.
Her swift decision may succeed in slaying what Rod Liddle memorably terms “the hydra-headed shit-monster” which has dominated Westminster since the referendum.
It needn’t have been that way. She had nine weeks to hone her pitch, and a decent backing of the grassroots, giving her as good a tilt at the top spot as May.
The contest was looking nasty turned nasty from the outset, in the wake of her much-criticised Times interview which ended in an apology to Theresa May over any implication her childlessness was a disadvantage.
Nobody will malign her integrity now.
Compare, if you will, the Conservatives with the chaos-ridden Labour party.
Even as Leadsom was dropping out, Angela Eagle was launching an ill-fated (and embarrassing) bid to unseat Jeremy Corbyn:
The Corbyn situation – a candidate supported by the grassroots but not his MPs – is exactly what a Theresa May coronation will avoid.
After the spectacle of Boris, Michael Gove and the rest of the Tory challengers falling over themselves in sequence like the conclusion of a Jacobean revenge tragedy, it is gratifying to see the civil war end in truce.