Johnson appears on campaign trail at last – to dance on Sunak’s grave | John Crace

Cast your mind back to 22 May. You probably wondered not just why Rishi Sunak had called an election at all, but why he had chosen a six-week campaign. It wasn’t as if he had anything new to say in that time. The economy wasn’t suddenly going to make a miraculous recovery. Hundreds of refugees weren’t going to volunteer to fly themselves to Rwanda. Patients weren’t about to take themselves off hospital waiting lists.

Rish! told us he had a plan. And it’s turned out he knew exactly what he was doing. Six weeks was what it would take. Six weeks was the perfect number. Six weeks is what it would take for the Tories to lose their minds completely.

The past five and a half weeks have just been a warm-up act of low-key events, idiotic policies such as national service – we haven’t heard so much about that recently – allegations of gambling with insider knowledge, and the “Leave Them on the Beaches” retreat from the D-day commemorations. Now, the pièce de résistance: the moment the Conservatives jumped the shark.

Tuesday morning was the perfect cluster-fuck. A threnody of national shame. Future generations will look back at Election 2024 in despair. How could we have sunk so low? The day dawned with a new Tory campaign video. A man waking up to yet another power cut. Albeit one where the electric alarm clock and the kettle are still working. Go figure.

The bloke in the video walks downstairs in the dark. Picks up a paper to find Rachel Reeves has put up taxes and that the stock market has crashed. Then he wakes up and finds it’s all a dream. This is so bad it’s almost laughable. To be effective an ad must at least be plausible. But this is the sort of disaster scenario more likely to occur under the current government.

You can only conclude that the advert had been made by some teenagers who had failed GCSE social media studies. Presumably they are the only people left in Tory central office.

Then there were the letters sent out to random voters round the country pretending to have been written by their future selves in 2044. Saying how they understood why they had voted Reform 20 years previously and that they had been badly let down by the voting system. Just bonkers. The first time the Tories have ever been known to make the case for electoral reform.

All this happened while you were asleep. So it’s likely you woke up to the halfwitted Maria Caulfield making the same claim made by Grant Shapps and other Tory ministers that Britain was no longer safe if Russia chose to invade after 6pm on a Friday.

“Starmer was planning to work a four-day week,” she said. This from a woman who has achieved so little she might as well have worked a two-day week. From a party that gave us the laziest prime minister in history in Boris Johnson. The man who missed five Cobra meetings. This made the new attack advert look sophisticated. The politics of the kindergarten.

Coordinating all this – someone must have been – was Sunak himself. On a whistle-stop tour of what before this election were rock-solid Tory home counties strongholds. No one is even pretending Rish! is going to win any more. It’s all damage limitation. Here the existential futility has been ramped up to new levels. Has there ever been anything quite so pointless as a 5am visit to an automated Ocado centre?

‘Are you voting for me?’ pleaded Rish!

‘No,’ said the robots in unison.

From there it was on to speak to almost no one in a supermarket owned by one of the few remaining Tory donors. A collector’s item that. Then to a farm in Banbury. Just to say he had been there. To prove to himself that he was dynamic. Mr Testosterone. Not like Sir Sleepy. It was desperate, desperate stuff. Fooling no one. A prime minister has seldom looked so alone.

We ended in Chelsea. Sunak’s second appearance in this upmarket constituency in as many weeks. This is no triumphal march. Five years ago, Boris Johnson had concluded his campaign in the Olympic Park in front of an adoring crowd. This was more a wake. One where the family had had plenty of time to process the death while the relative was still technically alive. The queue outside the National Army Museum had long since rattled through the five stages of grief. The mood was acceptance.

“Of course we’ve lost,” said one man.

“Yes, we lost the moment we got rid of Liz Truss,” replied his friend.

I’m not sure they’re quite in tune with the mood of the country.

There was a helicopter hanging from the ceiling above where a crowd of 400 people were gathered. Half of them security guards. The Saigon jokes wrote themselves. Sometimes I think the Tories are running the campaign for my benefit.

After half the cabinet – including a rare sighting of Jeremy Hunt and Lord Big Dave – had taken the stage (Mel Stride was inexplicably nowhere to be seen), Michael Gove stepped out. His speech was totally deranged. The Tories had a proud record in government.

You could see his former colleagues – Mikey is out of here, out of it – blanch. Don’t mention the war. The whole reason the Tories might finish third behind the Lib Dems is because of the last 14 years. Then he was rushing on his run. He might as well have said Labour would kill your babies. Worse, they would kill all dogs. They would make you homeless.

Eventually the Govester fell over, to be replaced by … Johnson . It’s almost as if the Tories want to lose this election by even more than predicted. Who to bring out but the man the Tories themselves had concluded was unfit to govern? The man most of the country are happy to forget. The audience went wild. “Boris, Boris”, they cheered. Louder than for Rish!. Natch.

What followed was classic Boris. He really doesn’t care. He appears to hate Rish! and so the only reason he would bother to appear was because he wanted to dance on Sunak’s grave.

He said he had been working tirelessly throughout the election. By going on holiday. He looked terrible. Wherever he’s been, it’s done him the world of harm. He rambled on about his own achievements for about 10 minutes. Not a word of praise for Rish!. The two did not appear to even return a glance with one another. Let alone shake hands. He ended by saying that Starmer would not stand up to Putin. It would have been laughable if it hadn’t been so tragic.

Finally we got Sunak. There was no great love for him. The cheers were half-hearted. “It’s great to have the Tory family back together,” he began. It didn’t look that way. And where was Truss? No funeral is complete without her. His speech then petered out. It was the same stump speech as always. And just as ineffectual. Then he wandered off back into the night.

Not with a bang but a whimper.