Oh, those racist Tories won’t elect a black woman, they said. They’ll go for that white bloke in the end. And what, in any case, is a black woman doing in the Conservative Party? Black people are our constituency, so we can place them in our victim box.

That the Tories have so royally upended the smug assumptions of those on the self-styled progressive left is nothing short of fabulous. What a weekend. The Labour Party has only ever been led by white men. The Tories, in contrast, have now, since the 1970s, had four female leaders and two from minority ethnic backgrounds.

Go put that in your woke pipe and smoke it. Perhaps electing on merit rather than all that virtue-signalling positive-discrimination garbage is the best approach after all? Who’d have thought it?

And oh boy, doesn’t the left hate this, with many greeting Badenoch’s victory with a spectacular lack of grace that could only ever be reserved for a woman of colour who defies the lefty world view.

Labour MP Dawn Butler wasted no time in reposting an odious comment describing Badenoch as the “most prominent member of white supremacy’s black collaborator class”, and declaring her election as “an obvious, unprecedented and once inconceivable victory for racism.” Gobsmacking.

Lefty commentators rushed to join in, with writer Frances Ryan describing Badenoch as “toxic” and “one of the nastiest, most divisive people in British politics”. And Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik, in a particularly mean-spirited character assassination, opined, ludicrously, that Badenoch was only elected leader now that the Conservatives’ prospects have “dwindled”.

“The implication”, mused Malik, is that when the party is not really in serious play, it can afford to experiment with new people who wouldn’t have been quite the right profile in more bountiful times.” I know, barmy and horrible.

On social media, the response from the hateful left has been even more obnoxious and despicable. If this is the way they greet the election of the first black person to lead a political party in the UK, you have to ask what on earth the word “progressive” really means.

But I take heart, and I’m sure Badenoch does too. Why, we must ask, is the left quite so speechless with indignation? Yes, in part, it’s that its view of the world simply cannot compute a black woman leading a centre-right party. But more importantly, the left correctly sees Badenoch as a threat.

Nobody’s pretending she’s the finished article. Her interview with Laura Kuenssberg shows that she’s got lots of work to do. She’s got battles on both flanks: Labour and the LibDems to the left, and a surging Reform UK to her right. Building a robust coalition of voters, and enough to make victory a prospect in 2029, is a fiendish task.

That’s why plenty are saying that she’ll fail, and that the pincer movement of Nigel Farage and Keir Starmer will destroy her. They’ll point to her mistakes and her ill-judged comments and they’ll predict she won’t last more than a couple of years.

But Badenoch has presence, charisma and ideas. She has identified the fundamental problems facing this country, and the foundations of a plan for change. Her anti-woke, small-state instincts represent mainstream Conservative thought that millions share.

What’s more, for the first time since Boris, the Tories have a leader who you can’t ignore. If nothing else, a Badenoch leadership, for as long as it lasts, won’t be boring. In fact, it will be a fascinating roller-coaster ride.