Who won the Conservative leadership races? Truss and Sunak played at Wembley and I want to break free

Like all good UK tours, the Tory leadership race ended with a greatest hits show at Wembley - but Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak still had room to try some crazy new material

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Image: PA)

Like all good UK tours, the Conservative leadership race ended with a night out at Wembley.

But unlike, say, the Queen's Magic Tour in 1986, it's unlikely that the audience at last night's latest roundups felt like they were witnessing a moment in cultural history that will be talked about for decades.

And the strips of empty seats in the venue - the OVO Wembley Arena, which is about a fifth the size of the main stadium - suggest that the choice of venue might have been somewhat optimistic.

Still, at least Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak played the hits - insofar as they said more or less the exact same things they did every other night for the past two months.

The scene set up for these hustings is weird. They're "in the circle" - much like Metallica's Death Magnetic tour in 2010 - with audiences on all sides.

The candidates had their backs to most of the spectators all evening (

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Getty Images)

But where thrash metal legends put Lars Ulrich on a rotating drum kit to make sure the whole crowd could see his growling mug, curators pointed everything on stage one way, so the suitors didn't talk than a quarter of the audience.

You can insert your own metaphor for Conservative prime ministers selected by a fraction of a fraction of the electorate here if you wish.

Michael Gove, there to introduce Sunak - who is trailing Truss by a billion points in the polls at this point - leapt onto the stage with a huge smile and shouted "HELLO WEMBLEY!", as if he had been waiting all his life to say these two words.