Liz Truss is Britain’s type on paper. The daughter of a university professor father and a mother who was a teacher and nurse, young Elizabeth grew up in a humble home of hard workers. She lived in various places, including along the road in Paisley where she went to primary school.

She also lived in Poland, and then in Canada, where she began to excel academically, setting her on a path of Oxford. She graduated, and worked for a while in the private sector before becoming an MP. So far, so good. A very British story, actually. Where did it go so wrong?

I have been in Ms Truss’s company a couple of times, once in a small group before she became an MP, and once in a larger group when she was a Cabinet Minister. It was during that first meeting - before which I had seen her credentials and been energised about meeting her - that I realised how many clever fools there are in life, and in politics.

I watched her rise through the political ranks with astonishment, bewildered that those who knew her well were unable to diagnose what I was able to diagnose in a very short meeting. The calamity of her mercifully short time in Downing Street was utterly unsurprising, at least to me.

Nonetheless, even I was surprised to see her flirtation with the ludicrous Steve Bannon on her trip to the US last week. As well as failing to flinch when Mr Bannon lauded Tommy Robinson, Ms Truss blamed her defenestration as Prime Minister on the ‘deep state’, the definition of which I can only presume she does not understand.

The Herald: Tommy Robinson Tommy Robinson (Image: free)

Not all fools are clever, of course, and there we are led to Lee Anderson. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak gave Mr Anderson a leading role in the Conservative Party specifically to blow an anti-immigration dog whistle to those voters, vulnerable to being peeled off by Nigel Farage’s Reform party, who think that Britain’s deep, institutionalised problems can somehow be solved if a few people in a boat are prevented from landing here.

Well, when you sleep with dogs, you get fleas, and you really shouldn’t whine about it after the fact.

Ms Truss and Mr Anderson epitomise why the Conservative Party is at a crossroads, and why, for its own sake, it desperately needs to lose this year’s General Election.

Having a strong and credible Conservative party, whether in government or in opposition, is deeply important for the country. The Tories have a rich history not just of winning elections, but of saving Britain and its economy from ruin.

The two Conservative victories-from-opposition of my lifetime - Margaret Thatcher’s in 1979 and, in a subtler way, David Cameron’s in 2010 - turned the economy towards growth. Growth, as we should know, means tax receipts, and tax receipts mean public expenditure on the services we want as a country.

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Here in Scotland’s post-devolution era, we can see in front of us the cost of not having a party of the centre-right which can govern. No Scottish Parliament, no Scottish Government, has properly understood the unbreakable relationship between economic growth, public service reform, and the health and wealth of the nation.

As a result, Scotland is emaciated, with its long-term prospects no better than its short-term ones. It lacks the centre-right ballast which all countries across Europe have, and which variously provides good government and good opposition.

In order to protect the Conservative party’s ability to play this role in the UK, the party needs now to undergo a difficult and fractious period of internecine strife, so that it can rid itself of insubstantial, unserious and unelectable people and their insubstantial, unserious and unelectable policies.

This may take time; probably at least a decade. But Britain will cope in the interim. In Sir Keir Starmer, we will have a Prime Minister of intellect and seriousness; a thoughtful leader with a solid foundation.

His Chancellor-in-waiting, Rachel Reeves, is deeply committed to building a lower-tax, higher-growth, higher-wage economy (having learned under the Chancellorship of the late, great Alistair Darling). At health, Wes Streeting is saying the most exciting things about NHS reform that we have heard from a leading politician for some time, perhaps ever.

So Britain will be just fine under Labour. The country will benefit from this version of the Labour Party, which will re-establish that politics is a business at its best when all of the serious political parties agree on the basic rules of the game; that a strong, growing economy is the basis for everything else. It will set in motion a generation of liberal political orthodoxy, which is what Britain needs at home, and needs to portray abroad.

Indeed, I would go so far as to say that, should Labour lose the election and Sir Keir’s extreme-left wing opponents in the party become re-energised, Britain as a whole will be the poorer, with a dysfunctional Conservative government becoming a depressing lesser of two evils.

The Herald: Sir Keir StarmerSir Keir Starmer (Image: free)

If the Tories lose, as all polls predict they will, there will be blood on the carpet. There will be, initially at least, a substantial push towards a populist, insular, dim-witted party. That is fine. It is only when that approach is decimated at the ballot box that a more intelligent, liberal, thoughtful strain of Conservative ideology can feel empowered to take back control.

There is a time to lose, and it is now. Political party members and activists can often allow emotion and hysteria to obscure strategic sense. They never want to lose. But winning at the wrong time is an enabler to moving more quickly in the wrong direction, and makes it exponentially harder to change course.

If you need proof, Tory friends, look across the Atlantic. Look at the Grand Old Party, founded to abolish slavery and promote liberalism and economic growth. The party of global economic and moral leadership. The party of Lincoln and Eisenhower and Reagan. Now led by Donald J. Trump.

It can happen. Do not be so naive as to believe that it cannot.

• Andy Maciver is a former Scottish Conservative Head of Communications and founding Director of Message Matters