Now that the campaign to be the next Prime Minister is over, let’s hope the rules are changed to make it less of an endurance test when it is next required.

For observers, it has been the political equivalent of the the niche Olympic sport of walking - or rolling of the hips to avoid looking like you are running.

As with the Olympic version, it has proved something of a challenge to determine who is in front but if the pundits are right, it will be Truss who breaks the finishing tape first, leaving Rishi in her wake.

You have to give her credit in what has been a stultifyingly dull contest, laden with meaningless platitudes and soundbites on top of even more vacuous statements. There’s an art to saying something that sounds like it means something but actually means nothing - which Boris Johnson has, too - but Liz Truss proved adept at.

Rishi was slick, maybe too slick and while he might have been catching up fast with his rival, He left it too late down the finishing straight.

The sound bites came thick and fast from both camps. The word ‘deliver’ was uttered more often than a postman; both were ‘focusing’ on their ‘number one’ priority (never their ‘number two); And that old favourite to a tricky question - ‘let me say this first’ - translated as ‘by the time they come back to it, they’ll forget what it was).

There was the occasional flashpoint. A leaked video of a hustings in what looked like a pub garden in that impoverished town Tunbridge Wells showed Rishi declaring how he had intervened as Chancellor to reverse funding formula that saw money being “shoved up north” at the expense of the south. You could almost hear the sound of sherry glasses falling to the ground in horror.

Meanwhile Kent County Council endeavoured to resolve the furore surrounding the controversial cuts to 32 bus services.

You had to look hard at the press release put out by the ruling Conservative administration to get to it though.

It set out in rather too much detail how it had stepped in as the saviour of a bunch of other bus services under threat because they were commercially unviable.

Right at the end, the press release said that its other unconnected plans to end subsidies to these services were on hold.