Watching the “beauty parade” of the final four Tory leadership candidates standing at their conference this week was an exercise in mental masochism best summed up in the phrase “appalled, but compelled to look”. This is, after all, the Party that voted for the very strange Liz Truss the last time they had a chance, and has barely changed or reflected on the experience.

First up was Tom Tugendhat. He came across to me as a man who is sufficiently sensitive and intelligent to be clinically depressed by the things that he believes in. And oddly two dimensional, like one of those cardboard cut outs they used to have in cinemas pointing you to your seat in the lower stalls or, in the case of the Conservative Party, the upper dress circle. the victim of a definite charisma by pass operation. War hero as dweeb.

Then James Cleverly, who went down better than the others because he actually had a sense of humour. Jokes by numbers from the other candidates fell into dead air where they had expected – or longed for – laughs. But, just as he was coming across as a relatable human being, he would say something mind numbingly dim. Given the audience, that also went down very well indeed.

Then Robert Jenrick. A man who gave one of his children the middle name “Thatcher”. Cruel and unusual punishment for an innocent child. I wonder if he’d have painted over the murals in her bedroom if he thought it would garner him a vote or two. But, even as a cartoon villian, there is something fake about Jenrick. Trying much too hard without the capacity to make it. Auditioning to act a big role but without the authenticity to live it. If Tugendhat is a cardboard replica of himself, Jenrick is an AI generated hollogram, or possibly hollow gram.

And rounding off a grim morning, Kemi Badenoch. Like Suella Braverman, Badenoch ingratiates herself into a party of xenophobes by being even more xenophobic than they are. In Braverman’s case, trying to contain the resulting psychic contradictions makes her a walking nervous wreck. Badenoch, by contrast, keeps things crushed under an icy control that allows her to blot out the fact that, for the racists she is trying to appeal to, “stop them coming” is just the first step to “send them back” – and the “them” would include her.

Having heard all four pitches, there is a standard script that barely varies, that goes something like this, but with a few of the unspoken parts added.

My friends (checks back for dagger).

You should vote for me because I have a personal backstory that involves self sacrificing, hard working parents who enabled me to slip up the greasy pole of achievement in a way that most people won’t, and that’s their fault for not being their best self.

I will never apologise for our record of achievement in office, that has just led us to being turfed out on our ear with the lowest number of MPs since 1832; so the first thing I want to say is sorry…but it wasn’t our fault.

Everything we did in the last 14 years was constrained by the Left establishment in the civil service and next time we shouldn’t be so restrained and perhaps should lock some of them up.

But look at the positives. We got Brexit done! And hasn’t that been a success?

We’ve been saying we want to get immigration down for 14 years and now we mean it. I will set a cap/legal limit, regardless of the damage that will do. If we start running out of construction workers, fruit pickers, care workers or nurses, thats the price we pay for not having quite as many foreign sounding people on the bus. Always remember. Queuing, and grumbling in queues, is a Fundamental British Value, and we intend to give people the chance to be in many, many more of them, going forward.

And we will pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights, because we are Fundamentally British and don’t see people born elsewhere as completely human. After all, we are the Party of the family, except when it comes to the brightest and the best from the rest of the world, who we will generously allow to migrate in to work for us, but not allow to bring their family with them.

And shouldn’t they be grateful to live among such Fundamentally British tolerant people?

Because no country has given the world as much as we have, from industrialisation to the internet (I won’t mention all the cultural things because thats just Hippy dippy Left wing nonsense) so, let’s face it conference, they owe us. Perish the thought that we took anything for ourselves at the time.

So, we should be proud of our History. All of it; especially the parts we should be ashamed of. The slave traders, whose statues proudly adorn our public spaces, owners of dark satanic mills, plantation owners, rack renters, leaders of punitive expeditions and arms dealers made this country – and our Party – what it is today. We stand on their monstrous shoulders and should be proud to do so.

But now, we live in a more dangerous world, so we will make it safer by increasing UK arms spending to 3% of GDP. After all, this country only ever acts militarily in self defence. I learned this myself on active service in Iraq and Afghanistan and, indeed, Luton.

And we will stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel, as it bombs its neighbours into the stone age, because if you can’t stand by an ally when it is commiting a genocide, what kind of fair weather friend are you?

And we have been such a friend to Ukraine that when there was a chance to secure a peace settlement within two months of the war starting, we made sure they didn’t sign up. I now pledge them £3 billion a year in continued military aid – a boost for our Fundamentally British arms industry – for as long as they can keep press ganging their men to fight.

I am not a climate denier, but I am a Net Zero sceptic. So, the problem is real, but we have no plans to deal with it. We made a mistake to set targets without plans, so the solution isn’t to develop a plan, but to abandon the targets. That’ll sort it. Hopefully none of you were flooded out this week or, if you were, you were here and didn’t notice.

And we cannot be content with the managed decline of our economy. Let us shift the burden from the broadest to the narrowest shoulders; as a reward for all that hard work that makes those of in this hall so smugly well off.

Because we believe that you, and hard working families, should keep more of your money, and less of it should go to people who don’t work hard, like train drivers and teachers and doctors.

Relieving the tax burden on the wealthy has nothing to do with our corporate paymasters, and everything to do with encouraging people to build businesses around their kitchen tables (with or without an Allen key from ikea). Because nothing enables small business success more than liberation from paying for burdensome regulations like too much maternity pay, or being held back by health and safety gone mad. Risking two, three many Grenfells in the future is part of the brave new world of uncertainty that we should embrace with enthusiasm, as it sorts out the sheep of enterprise from the goats of failure.

Winners gonna win. Losers gonna lose.

So, let us beat the drum for capitalism, which is taking the number of food banks and people sleeping rough to ever greater heights.

God save the King….And God help us all…