Johnson finally appears on campaign trail to dance on Sunak's grave | John Crace

VSRewind to May 22. You probably wondered not only why Rishi Sunak called an election, but also why he chose a six-week campaign. It wasn’t as if he had anything new to say at that point. The economy wasn’t going to suddenly miraculously recover. Hundreds of refugees weren’t going to volunteer to fly to Rwanda. Patients weren’t going to remove themselves from hospital waiting lists.

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

The last five and a half weeks have been a warm-up of low-key events, of silly policies such as national service, which we have not heard much about recently, the allegations of insider gambling, and the removal of D-Day commemorations from Operation Leave Them on the Beaches. Now for the point of resistance: the moment the Tories jumped the shark.

Tuesday morning was a complete mess. A drama of national shame. Future generations will look back with despair at the 2024 election. How did we sink so low? The day dawned with a new Conservative campaign video. A man wakes up because of yet another power cut. Even though the electric alarm clock and the kettle still work. Go figure.

The guy in the video is walking down the stairs in the dark. He picks up a newspaper and discovers that Rachel Reeves has raised taxes and the stock market has crashed. Then he wakes up and discovers it's all a dream. It's so bad it's almost laughable. To be effective, an ad has to at least be plausible. But this is the kind of worst-case scenario that's most likely to happen under the current administration.

One can only conclude that the advert was made by teenagers who failed their GCSE in social media studies. They are probably the only people left in the Conservative Party's central office.

There were also the letters sent to randomly selected voters across the country, claiming to have been written by them in the future, in 2044. They explained that they understood why they had voted for reform 20 years earlier and that they had been seriously disappointed by the electoral system. It was just crazy. It was the first time that the Conservatives had argued for electoral reform.

All this happened while you were asleep. So chances are you woke up to hear Maria Caulfield, an idiot, claiming the same thing as Grant Shapps and other Tory ministers, that Britain was no longer safe if Russia decided to invade after 6pm on a Friday.

Starmer had planned to work four days a week, she said. This from a woman who had achieved so little she might as well have worked two days a week. This from a party that gave us the laziest prime minister in history, Boris Johnson. The man who missed five Cobra meetings. It gave the new attack ad a sophisticated look. Kindergarten politics.

The coordinator of all this must have been Sunak himself. He has been on a whirlwind tour of what were, before this election, rock-solid Tory strongholds. No one even pretends that Rish! will win anymore. It is all about damage limitation. Here, existential futility has reached new heights. Has there ever been anything as pointless as a 5am visit to an automated Ocado centre?

Are you voting for me? Rish begged!

No, the robots said in unison.

From there he must have spoken to almost no one in a supermarket owned by one of the last 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. No one was fooled. A prime minister has rarely seemed so alone.

We finished in Chelsea. It was Sunak’s second appearance in this posh constituency in as many weeks. This was not a triumphal march. Five years ago, Boris Johnson ended his campaign in the Olympic Park to a cheering crowd. This was more of a wake. A wake where the family had had plenty of time to grieve while their loved one was still technically alive. The queue outside the National Army Museum had long since passed through the five stages of grief. The mood was one of acceptance.

Of course we lost, said one man.

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

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

There was a helicopter hanging from the ceiling, where 400 people had gathered. Half of them were security guards. The jokes about Saigon wrote themselves. Sometimes I think the conservatives are running the campaign for my own good.

After half the cabinet, including Jeremy Hunt and Lord Big Dave, had spoken (Mel Stride was inexplicably absent), Michael Gove walked out. His speech was totally deranged. The Tories had a respectable record in government.

You could see that his old colleagues Mikey had gone, he had gone from there, he had gotten out of there. Don't talk about the war. The only reason the Tories could finish third to the Liberal Democrats is because of the last 14 years. So he rushed into his campaign. He might as well have said Labour would kill your babies. Worse still, they would kill all the dogs. They would make you homeless.

Eventually the governor fell and was replaced by Johnson. It was almost as if the Tories wanted to lose this election with even more defeats than they had expected. Who to bring in but the man the Tories themselves had deemed unfit to govern? The man most of the country is happy to forget. The crowd went wild. Boris, Boris, they cheered. Louder than for Rish!. Of course.

What followed was classic Boris. He doesn't care at all. He seems to hate Rish! and so the only reason he bothered to appear was because he wanted to dance on Sunak's grave.

He said he had worked tirelessly throughout the election campaign. Going on holiday. He looked terrible. Wherever he went, it hurt him the most. He talked about his own achievements for about 10 minutes. Not a word of praise for Rish!. The two did not even seem to exchange a glance. Let alone shake hands. He ended by saying that Starmer would not stand up to Putin. It would have been laughable if it had not been so tragic.

Finally, we had Sunak. There was not much affection for him. The cheers were mixed. “It’s great that the Tory family is together again,” he began. It didn’t seem that way. And where was Truss? No funeral is complete without her. His speech then petered out. It was the same campaign speech as always. And just as ineffective. Then he walked off into the night.

Not with a crash but with a whimper.