You’d have thought that if Theresa May was really serious about the UK not taking part in the European elections, she might have chosen not to spend the whole of last week on holiday. And that she might have been pushing ahead to get her deal through parliament sometime this week. Or next. Instead her team have been involved in ongoing half-hearted talks with Labour that everyone knows will inevitably end in deadlock. The most interesting development to emerge so far has been the varied sandwich menu.

But the prime minister is a woman who likes to have a plan. Even if her plan is to have no plan. So the government is adamant there is no need for it to make any more than cursory arrangements for the elections due to take place in four weeks’ time. The Conservatives are the uncoiled spring. Poised to give the appearance of being taken by surprise. Not everyone is quite so convinced the elections won’t happen, which is why they have been using the time since article 50 was extended until October to prepare for them.

Ten days ago Nigel Farage launched the Brexit party at a factory in Coventry with an unashamed appeal to disaffected Tory voters. Now he was in London to reinvent himself as a latter-day Michael Foot. A committed socialist who only had the interests of the British working-class at heart with his dedication to leaving the EU.

As before, another radical Marxist, the millionaire property developer Richard Tice, a man with the air of a failed Robert Kilroy-Silk reduced to doing the night shift as a presenter on the Shopping Channel, acted as master of ceremonies. With Tice humming the Red Flag, Farage made his way to the platform.

He was there to emancipate the little people, he insisted. The downtrodden and the dispossessed who were being denied the Brexit that hucksters like him had always insisted would be a piece of piss. Even a skilled chameleon like Nigel couldn’t quite pull that one off. However hard he tries, he just can’t manage anything more than ersatz sincerity. Nige has only ever been about the glorification of Nige. The narcissist’s narcissist.

Then came the latest recruits to the Brexit party, the men and women of the left who lived and breathed class struggle. First up was professional contrarian Claire Fox, a woman with a complicated past. To put it kindly. She is a former member of the Revolutionary Communist party, which failed to condemn the Warrington IRA bombers and accused ITN of exaggerating war crimes in Bosnia. Letting her bygones be bygones, she now just expects others to conform to standards on the Moral Maze to which she can only dream. Farage should be more careful of the company he keeps.

Labour had been sneering at its leave voters ever since the referendum, she sneered. Fox is incapable of doing anything without a sneer. There’s a huge irony that as the self-appointed director of the Academy of Ideas – recently downgraded from the Institute of Ideas – the only ideas in which Fox is at all interested are her own. So she was happy to overlook the fact that Farage still had no plans for how the UK economy would survive a no-deal Brexit, had happily run a campaign branded as racist in the 2016 referendum and had never previously expressed any significant interest in workers’ rights.

Brexit was a Platonic democratic ideal. And was therefore sacrosanct. Fox was standing on the shoulders of working-class heroes. The Levellers. The Tolpuddle Martyrs. The victims of the Peterloo Massacre. Boris Johnson. Jacob Rees-Mogg. Tommy Robinson. St Nigel. And if more people had to die to achieve the one true Brexit, then so be it. Just as long as it wasn’t her.

The parade of false consciousness – or possibly amnesia – continued with the introduction of further Brexit party MEP candidates. A former soldier who made the mistake of saying he cared about climate change. Something about which Farage has his doubts. A smoked salmon producer called Lance Forman, who was adamant he had lost faith with the Tories when May entered into talks with a former Marxist turned racist. Lance, meet Claire and Nigel.

Moments later, 120 miles to the west in Bristol, Change UK – aka the Independent Group – were having their own event to introduce some of their own MEP candidates. A list that read like some of the most active remainers on Twitter and headed by Gavin Esler and Rachel Johnson. Boris’s sister wisely chose to keep a back seat. Having previously campaigned for the Tories and joined the Lib Dems, there’s an even chance she might join Labour by the end of the month. Still, a bit of Johnson on Johnson action gives the elections an added edge.

After speeches from Heidi Allen, Esler and two other candidates, Anna Soubry took centre stage. The Brexit party wasn’t the party of democracy. Farage and his accomplices were merely poseurs. True democracy meant putting any deal to a people’s vote. Though not a general election as that would only confuse people and might lead to some MPs losing their seats. No names, no pack drill.

“We are the true remain alliance,” Soubry declared. Apart from the fact Change UK wasn’t actually in an alliance with anyone, having refused to do any deals with the Lib Dems, Greens or SNP. Having long been called the basket case of Europe, the UK is now behaving like it. A bit-part actor in a long-running soap. Confused? You soon will be.