“I think the poster is amazing,” says Nicky Morgan. “It made me laugh. It could be a game changer.”

Quite why the Conservatives might want to change a game that the opinion polls suggest they are winning at a canter is left hanging. But moments later, about 15 members of the media are taken to the back of Millbank Tower in Westminster for the launch of the new Tory advertising campaign.

There on the the side of a poster van is a picture of Jeremy Corbyn with the slogan “Prime Ditherer”. Everyone just gives a bored “is that it?” shrug, while Morgan and Needy Matt Hancock try to look vaguely enthusiastic. Whatever focus group came up with that ad must have been comatose on downers.

Quite why Morgan is involved at all is also something of a mystery. Only recently the culture secretary announced she wouldn’t be standing again in her Loughborough constituency and you would have expected her to have been retired to the long grass by Conservative campaign headquarters. So you can only imagine that CCHQ have decided that every other member of the cabinet is too much of a liability to be let out in front of the public and have begged Morgan for one last favour before she leaves Westminster.

Not that the morning had gone totally to plan. Boris Johnson had been put in for a reboot – he now resembles a gone-to-seed 1970s Giant Haystacks doll with a malfunctioning voice mechanism that can only repeat the same three lame gags over and over again – and so Morgan was the only vaguely credible Tory politician available to defend the manifesto on the media. Though even Chris Grayling might have done better on Good Morning Britain when trying to explain away how 19,000 of the extra 50,000 nurses that had been promised were merely nurses who were currently working and wouldn’t be deported.

“If the three of us presenting GMB turn up for work tomorrow, there’s still only three of us,” Susannah Reid had explained patiently. Not at all, Morgan insisted. If the three presenters had said they weren’t going to appear and then changed their minds, there were actually six presenters. Morgan clearly is a dualism extremist. Her mind-body split is so real there are two of her wherever she goes. Though on current form, we’ve yet to encounter an intelligent version of her. Imagine the disappointment of finding there’s another you that’s equally as dim.

“You did really well on TV this morning,” Hancock had said to Morgan, just before they went outside to introduce the crap poster. One could only assume that either Tigger Matt had actually expected Nicky to be even worse or if he had taken perverse pleasure in her misfortunes. Schadenfreude is every politician’s secret pleasure. After all, it could have been him that was being made to look an idiot.

Still, Morgan appeared to have put her bruising encounter with GMB behind her as she read a few lines that had been handed to her by the No 10 team. Corbyn was a ditherer, she said. He had dithered over Brexit. This might have sounded rather more convincing from someone who hadn’t dithered over Brexit herself. Not so long ago, she was a remainer. Now she was a Brexiter.

This wasn’t the way Morgan remembered it. She had been a passionate remainer and now she was a passionate Brexiter. So she hadn’t dithered at all. She had been utterly decisive in her indecision. Much like the prime minister who had voted against Brexit on two occasions.

Hancock reckoned Morgan had dug herself in deep enough and took over. Corbyn wasn’t just a ditherer on Brexit, he was a ditherer on national security. Should the occasion arise, he would think twice about firing nukes. What the country was crying out for was a lunatic Dr Strangelove who would shoot first and ask questions later. Suddenly dithering sounded quite an attractive option after all.

Weren’t the Conservatives also guilty of dithering on social care, Morgan was asked. After all, the prime minister had promised to do something about it when he arrived in Downing Street and there was nothing concrete about it in the manifesto. Ah, that wasn’t Boris’s fault. That was just a printing error. The pages about social care had come out blank. In any case, who really cared about people with dementia anyway? And no, she definitely had not been offered a job or a peerage by No 10 for doing all this media stuff. She was doing it because she could never resist the opportunity to fail better.

The media gradually dispersed, aware that there had been even less to see than they had imagined. Finally there was just Hancock giving a TV interview left. It was quite sweet really. Because the health secretary is the only person in the entire country who hasn’t realised the 40 new hospitals won’t be built. Tigger is the last person standing to believe a word the prime minister says.

“They will be built,” Needy insisted, his eyes widening in panic. And there would definitely be 50,000 more nurses. On top of the 19,000 nurses who wouldn’t be deported. So really there would be 69,000 extra nurses. “The numbers will go up from 280,000 to 330,000.”

Morgan shuffled over to correct him. There were actually 560,000 nurses already and there would soon be 660,000. Things could only get double. Satisfied that their maths was now correct, Nicky 1 and Nicky 2 headed off for their lunches.