Braverman is spearheading the Tories' maddest phase yet

The Tory party knows it is sinking. You can tell not only because so many of them have already got their eye on the soon-to-be-vacant captain's job, but also because they reckon they can get it by driving into the iceberg again, but this time even harder

- ТОМ PECK

For some reason, the Conservative Party is having not one but two fully deranged “conventions” over the weekend and into this week, and both are seeking to outdo the other in their complete and utter failure to understand the inevitable consequences of absolutely everything they’ve done.

It’s commendable, in a way. The psychodrama of self-interest is all that most of them have cared about for a very long time, so we, the mere people, should be grateful that they’ve now hired a range of cheap convention facilities in which to do it, freeing at least some of them to plough on with the quotidian humdrum of actually running the country. That hasn’t always been the case.

On Saturday, Boris Johnson’s biggest fans gathered in Bournemouth to bid for some bottles of wine signed by Boris Johnson and to listen to Tory MP Andrea Jenkyns sing the national anthem – twice. These people really do think that bringing back Boris would sort their problems out. One suspects they also think that Hiroshima was mainly the fault of the people who failed to adequately hoover up after it.

This week, in an old church hall near Westminster, various senior Tories will be swanning in and out of the National Conservatism Conference to talk about an apparently new form of conservatism called “national conservatism” which absolutely is not new, and definitely is not going to answer their prayers.