Don't write off The Saj. He's fighting a different battle.

There are two battles being fought in the Tory Party right now.

The first is the obvious one, which is over the Conservatives’ stance on the UK’s exit from the EU. With Farage riding high in the polls, the dynamic is clearly towards the election of a hard Brexiter, who is prepared to countenance a no-deal departure. That’s why it’s hard to see anything other than a Boris premiership, despite the Old Etonian’s obvious unsuitability for the role.

Other candidates – Dominic Raab and Esther McVey, for example – have vowed to be just as tough with Brussels. We then see a spectrum of opinion and rhetoric, which stretches all the way to the fairly sensible, if skeletal, figure of Rory Stewart, who is presumed to have little chance among the Tory faithful.

The other battle, in many ways, is the more interesting one. It’s over the long-term future of British conservatism beyond Brexit.

This debate is understandably somewhat lost amid the current sense of intrigue and crisis, but it is there nevertheless. It’s a contest over ideology and class and representativeness. And that’s why the candidacy of Sajid Javid is so interesting.

The Saj has gained little momentum and is unlikely to emerge triumphant on this occasion, but may well hope to pick up the pieces if the Conservative Party is annihilated through Brexit and Johnson’s incompetence.

Javid’s back story is well documented. The first Home Secretary to hail from an ethnic minority background, he comes from humble beginnings in a crime-ridden part of Bristol. Indeed, his daily victuals were not served from a Bullingdon Club silver spoon and he can claim to be a genuinely self-made man.

Why does this matter? Javid is a clever operator and much more in touch with the culture of modern Britain than many of his privileged or aristocratic rivals. Intriguingly, he won the backing of Ruth Davidson, the fiery Scottish politician whose own leadership potential is undermined only by the lack of a seat in the Westminster Parliament.

Javid is an heir to Margaret Thatcher and the hard-nosed, meritocratic ideology she espoused in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Every year, according to reports, he ritually re-reads a classic scene from The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, in which Howard Roark extols the virtues of individualism.

If the Conservative Party is ever to rise Phoenix-like from the ashes of the Brexit debacle, it will not be thanks to the patricians, but because they have been usurped by champions of the aspiring working and middle classes.

While in 2019, with Europe so dominant in our national discourse, it’s probably obvious to the Saj that it is not his time, but he won’t be too worried. He may sense that a fresh start – built from the ruins of defeat – is not going to be too far away.