For many people reading this, the analogy will seem ludicrous, but hear me out: if the Conservative party was one of your friends, you’d be very worried about them.

You can maybe imagine it: a privately educated pal from university, perhaps, who seems to have fallen on hard times and bad company. Ten or 15 years ago, they seemed urbane, clever and super-confident. Even if some of it went only skin deep, they professed to be green, socially liberal and culturally switched on. Now, though, they tend to look dishevelled and saggy-eyed. After a few drinks – and sometimes before – they speak an increasingly hysterical language of conspiracy theory and political paranoia. They also seem to be furtively spending some of their time with thugs and bigots: the kind of people whom that great English social commentator Paul Weller once associated with the smell of “pubs, and Wormwood Scrubs, and too many rightwing meetings”.

Last week, the latest election projection from YouGov predicted the Tories’ number of Commons seats plunging from 348 to 155. The party now seems to pin its hopes of avoiding complete wipeout on putting a few refugees on a plane bound for Rwanda – ideally, it seems, in the wake of a showdown with judges in Strasbourg. Meanwhile, Suella Braverman, whose time as home secretary included the insistence that this was her personal “dream”, is about to headline a rightwing gathering in Belgium alongside the authoritarian Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán. In a similar spirit, Liz Truss decided to try to escape the disgrace of her lost weekend in 10 Downing Street by calmly standing on a platform while a fellow speaker lauded Tommy Robinson as a “hero”. Giving another signal about who her new allies might be, last week she attended Nigel Farage’s 60th birthday party.

These things feed a sense of uncontrolled Tory foment, with........

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