In search of clout in Tory race, Jimmy Dimly brings on the Shappster | John Crace

You have to take your pleasures where you find them in this new age of miserabilism. Anyone found to be enjoying themselves too much might accidentally cause a run on the pound. Smile and Lucy Powell will have to call in the International Monetary Fund. Such pronouncements are apparently now to be taken seriously. We must all suffer a punishment beating for the last 14 years of Tory government. That clacking you can hear? The sound of pensioners’ teeth chattering.

But there is still fun to be had in Westminster if you know where to look. And for that we have to turn our eyes to Planet Tory. A barren lump of rock in a galaxy far, far away where some early life forms are struggling for survival.

Hard to believe, I know, but some Tories still feel that the leadership of their party is a prize worth having. Even if they appear doomed to remain in opposition for the foreseeable future. Like Michael Howard and Iain Duncan Smith before them, they are headed for insignificance.

No matter. On Monday morning, two more former government ministers kickstarted their leadership campaigns. In the basement of the former War Office, a few assorted Tories and journalists had gathered for James Cleverly. A man with an unerring – if unintentional – sense of comic timing. His launch was to be a collector’s item. One that at its apogee was watched by all of 2,600 people on X. So a niche entertainment. But if you missed it, you might be able to watch on catchup.

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Even the supporting acts were good value. The new Tory MP for Leicester East doubling up as a junior school prefect. Then an all too rare appearance from Grant Shapps. Truly, we were being spoiled. Imagine this. You are looking for a politician of real gravitas. Someone with real clout to big you up. And the best you can come up with is the Shappster. A man of multiple personalities. None of them real. A man whose very smirk shouts loser. Someone who epitomises the hollowness of the previous government.

At this point any sensible leadership contender might have thrown in the towel. Would have reckoned that if a man who lost his seat at the last election – even the public have seen through him, Jimmy – was your biggest supporter then you might be in deep trouble before you start. But not Jimmy Dimly. I had forgotten how much of a laugh the former home and foreign secretary can be. Jimmy D sees Grant and thinks: “Bring him on.”

“I know what it takes to rebuild a party,” said Shapps. Not so sure about that. Though you can’t deny he knows how to ruin one. Then he launched into Dimly’s back catalogue of achievements. Most of them largely imaginary. At the Home Office he had implemented the Rwanda scheme. A policy he had privately described as batshit. You’d have thought he might want to gloss over that part of the CV.

But this was only the start. What really impressed the Shappster was Jimmy’s unique working style. Dimly could be relied on to do things in the right order. Always make sure you have entered a room before attempting to sit down. Always switch on the ignition before trying to reverse. These are the life skills you just can’t buy. To be fair, the Tory gene pool of talent is very shallow. But even so.

Then the man himself. Dimly took the stage to share his experience, strength and hope. His vision. Really, he needn’t have bothered. It was almost all slightly deranged. First off the obligatory swipe at Labour. Keir Starmer’s government was the most useless and corrupt in history. Worse even than Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. All in seven weeks. Who would have guessed?

No one was going to say that Jimmy wasn’t an ideas man. Just a shame they were all bad ones. He was going to raise spending on defence to 3% of GDP. All paid for by unspecified spending cuts. Stop nit-picking. He was going to solve the housing crisis by getting everyone to build a two-bedroom flat on top of their existing home. Why hadn’t anyone thought of that before? He was going to get rid of the existing GDP measurements as they were useless except when they were glorifying the last government’s success.

Robert Peel. Benjamin Disraeli. Margaret Thatcher. Jimmy Dimly. The Tory heroes tripped off his tongue. Now for the clincher. “I am the best communicator,” he insisted. Not something a good communicator normally has to spell out to their audience. Still, he had successfully communicated that he wasn’t that bright. So that was something. Baby steps and all that.

Earlier in the day, Kemi Badenoch had launched her campaign in central London. An event from which some sketch writers were excluded. Left to follow on X. Maybe we were done a favour. This felt, bizarrely, both more formal and at the same time less consequential than Cleverly’s. Maybe that’s because Kemi reckons the prize is hers to lose. She has the more solid support of MPs. All she has to do is make sure she doesn’t insult anyone too badly in the coming weeks.

Maybe Kemi had been drugged. But she seemed to have come with the brief of saying as little as possible. Anything to not rock the boat. Muttering “Be nice to everyone, Kemi” under her breath. And she just about managed it. Superhuman effort. The most surprising thing she said was that she could be charming. Not something even her closest friends would ever say. She’s never happier than when embarking on some pointless culture war on X.

Mostly, Kemi just mumbled a bit. Having not really anything to say. Policy didn’t really get a look in other than in the Q&A when she took swipes at Tom Tugendhat for putting a figure on migration and Robert Jenrick for threatening to leave the European convention of human rights. She would get rid of as many people as the public wanted her to. The ECHR was a distraction. She didn’t know how she was going to do any of this, but she would work it out. She was an engineer. We’ll hear a lot of this.

“I was brought up under a socialist government in Nigeria,” she said. Not quite true. She grew up under a military dictatorship. The truth can be whatever Kemi wants it to be. Like Cleverly she was convinced that Starmer was the devil incarnate. It was both nothing and everything. Her supporters felt she had nailed it. Mainly by being as little like herself as she could manage.