There’s a certain type of movie character that finds time to suggest a shag even in the midst of a crisis. If anything, the fact the bomb clock is ticking or planetary destruction is pending gets them in the mood. The Tories are like that, but with backstabbing. There are 84 days until Brexit, Theresa May’s deal is about to get voted down heavily and bump the UK a few weeks closer to a calamitous no-deal exit, and the first thought of certain Tory leadership hopefuls is, “Ooh, how can I do over ‘the Saj’?”

If you missed this latest flurry of displacement activity, a report claimed the home secretary refers to himself in the third person during meetings. According to what a source told the Sun, and which Javid hotly denied: “He uses phrases like, ‘Just you watch what the Sajid is going to do about this’, or ‘the Saj will sort that out’.” Oof. These drive-bys made a charming companion piece to the articles suggesting that Javid was failing to get a grip on Britain’s nonexistent migrant “crisis”, and the very detailed articles about Javid’s very luxurious South African holiday.

The sheer amount of energy senior Tories have expended knifing occasional leadership frontrunner Sajid Javid this week is quite spellbinding. It’s like discovering that, as the Deepwater Horizon rig had blown out and begun spewing vast amounts of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, BP executives had decided to hold a 96-hour black-tie murder mystery party. Even by the Conservatives’ own standards, there’s a true decadence to it.

But please don’t get me wrong. I would be very relaxed if we were witnessing The Last Days of the Saj, given the home secretary’s deportment this week. To stand on a dock and suggest that Britain “will do everything we can” to stop refugees from achieving asylum in order to deter other refugees is morally repugnant and arguably illegal.

To do so transparently to promote your career, and only after very reluctantly tearing yourself away from your £840-per-person-per-night luxury South African safari resort suggests you’ve got some crucial part of the leadership lobe missing and should be invalided out of future contests without delay.

And so to the holiday that put the home secretary in such a misanthropic mood. Assuming the quoted rate is based on double occupancy, the Dulini Lodge clocks in at almost £1,700 per room per night, which feels … a lot? I mean, you’re spotting giraffes, not being treated for sex addiction. For £1,700 a night, I wouldn’t want to just spot Harvey Weinstein – I think I’d want to be taking his head home for my trophy wall. I have a Minnesotan dentist he’d look great next to. Javid is furious about what he sees as the tactical leaking of his private plunge pool and wine cellar arrangements, and suspects a specific senior No 10 figure. Could be. That said, which of us would rule out any number of other rivals, having watched cub defence secretary Gavin Williamson pointedly say he hadn’t received a request from Javid for a navy vessel to patrol the Channel. A clearly stung Javid let it be known that he had now written to Williamson to request just such a thing. Surprised he didn’t hire a skywriter. Then again, there’s something fitting about this grotesquery playing out like a wildly passive-aggressive epistolary novel in the Les Liaisons Dangereuses mould. “My dear Vicomte Williamson …” “My dear Le Saj …”

In the end, though, neither of these posturing inadequates was sufficient to distract from Chris Grayling. This government is now so inanimate it doesn’t have a spirit animal; it has a spirit vegetable. Unless Grayling’s a mineral, which I’ll increasingly accept.

‘Chris Grayling is the ultimate poster child for anyone whose inner voice tells them they couldn’t be something because they’re honestly just sensationally bad at it.’ Photograph: Tim Ireland/Xinhua/Barcroft Images

Few organisations have done more to positively discriminate in favour of the clueless or incompetent than the Tory administrations of the past few years, but even accounting for the likes of Iain Duncan Smith and Andrea Leadsom, Chris Grayling is the ultimate poster child for anyone whose inner voice tells them they couldn’t be something because they’re honestly just sensationally bad at it.

In a move in no way likely to hint at the delights to come, 2019 began with Chris Grayling taking to the airwaves seeking to justify the fact that, as part of his no-deal preparations, he has awarded a £13.8m ferry contract to a company with no ferries. According to Grayling, he’s very relaxed about Seaborne Freight, and will “make no apologies for supporting a new British business”. I like how Chris is treating no-deal Brexit like an episode of Dragons’ Den. Not only does Seaborne Freight have no ferries, but as the week wore on it turned out to have cut and pasted its website terms and conditions from those of a food delivery service. For that reason, I’m out.

Somehow even less self-aware than Grayling, alas, is David Davis, the former Brexit secretary, who on Thursday declared that May should delay the deal vote even further to put pressure on the EU. “This is the moment to be hard nosed about these issues,” he wrote in the Telegraph. Like me, you may by now be so very, very over David Davis’s backseat hardman act. He had two years to put pressure on the EU, and according to a former permanent secretary at the Foreign Office “could hardly be bothered to go to Brussels”.

It was the same at the last-but-one Tory conference, when a comedian managed to get to Theresa May and hand her a p45 during her speech, only to be belatedly taken away by security. “He’s lucky I didn’t hit him,” Davis told reporters several days after the event, “or he’d have been down for a long time.” Mmm. If you look at the footage from the conference hall, luck doesn’t have a whole lot to do with it. David Davis doesn’t hit the unknown man who approaches the prime minister as a potential security threat, because David Davis stays sitting in his chair the whole time. Not so much a tale of derring-do, as a tale of derring-didn’t.

And yet, Davis remains hugely popular with Tory members, which brings us to new research revealing that, while only 35% of the public would prefer to leave the EU with no deal, 76% of Tory members would. This time last year, the same researchers found out that only 41% of Tory members supported gay marriage, while 80% of Labour, Liberal Democrat and SNP members did. And 54% of Tory members supported the return of the death penalty, against just 9% of Labour members, 8% of Lib Dems, and 23% of SNP members.

I can’t think why it might be that, at last year’s conference, alleged leadership frontrunner Sajid Javid could barely half-fill the conference hall. If I ever do put my finger on it, I imagine it will be closely related to the reason Javid feels he must be twice as hard and heartless on migrants as anyone else in the cabinet – as well as the sort of guy who goes further than everyone, and talks about “sick Asian paedophiles”.

Until then, it’s worth bearing in mind that, unless Tory MPs somehow unite around a single successor to May, they will be sending two names out to be decided upon by this particular mind pool. Will that time come later or sooner? Happy New Year, either way.

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist