No one can accuse the Tories of not having a sense of fun. For who should turn up at a Resolution Foundation event on what the Tories need to do to win the next election but the chief secretary to the Treasury, Liz Truss, and Theresa May’s former joint head of staff, Nick Timothy. A dream team who have done far more than their fair share to make the Tories unelectable.

Truss’s main contributions have been ones of omission. In particular, the omission of a brain. Wire her up to an EEG and you’d be hard pushed to find any sign of activity. No one has yet told Truss that the Tories are in the process of tearing themselves and the country apart over Brexit. Rather she saw the UK as being in a bit of a lull, with people’s principal anxiety centred on waiting to find out what the government would announce in its spending review later in the year. And not just any spending review but a “People’s Spending Review”.

We were on the brink of a new dawn, a period of reinvention where the Tories could win over industrial Britain, rural Britain and enterprise Britain – or just Britain, as most people would call it – by opening more coffee shops and creating some opportunity zones for discos. These were the free market drivers of a great civilisation. Along with turning on white elephants and vested interests. She studiously ignored the real elephant in the room – how someone with so little ability can wind up in the cabinet.

To be fair, Truss is a rank amateur compared with Timothy, a man whose fingerprints are to be found all over every recent Conservative disaster. It was Timothy who basically told the whole country to sod off in May’s “Citizens of Nowhere” speech.

It was Timothy who drew the prime minister’s Brexit red lines on freedom of movement, the customs union and the ECJ that will make the UK significantly worse off; Timothy who persuaded may to hold a general election in 2017, and Timothy who wrote the manifesto that went a long way to losing the Tories their overall majority.

In short, Timothy is a disaster specialist. The person you turn to only when you want things to go wrong. Someone with an instinctive flair for failing upwards. Just recently he was appointed to the organising committee for the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham. It’s now a near certainty none of the facilities will be completed on time and that the games will now consist of a few obstacle races in a lorry park outside Dover the following year.

What makes this all the more tragic is that Timothy is blessed with little self-awareness. A pitch to the Tory party to do the exact opposite of every word he said might have been of some benefit. But he still somehow believes he has something more to offer. It’s not that his analysis has ever been wrong, just that it has invariably been misinterpreted.

Timothy also steered clear of Brexit. Just as well, as his last contribution to the debate had been to suggest in the Daily Telegraph that one way to avoid a Northern Ireland backstop would be for Ireland to become part of the UK. Can’t think why no one had thought of that before.

Instead, he avoided all eye contact with the audience and mumbled something about the Tories being nicer to poor people while still remembering to take them for granted. The exact logic of this bypassed everyone, as his speech patterns became ever more randomised and disconnected. Like his former boss, he has perfected the art of being absent from his own life. If only he was absent from ours as well.

By now it was impossible to tell if we were at a serious political event or a niche, corporate comedy gig. The support acts definitely seemed to assume the latter. Charlotte Pickles, the managing editor of UnHerd, declared she could never dream of voting anything other than Tory, but just wished it would adopt the Labour policies of higher taxation and greater unionisation.

Will Tanner, another former adviser to the prime minister, insisted the Conservatives had been unfairly depicted as ideological over Brexit. Hello! You couldn’t make this stuff up. I half expected the whole line-up to run through a few old Cannon and Ball routines, rounded off with a song and dance chorus of Springtime for Hitler.

Instead, with Timothy now reduced to complete incoherence, it was left to Truss to wind things up with a full-on midlife crisis. There had never been a better time for the Tory party, she insisted. At the next election, the Conservatives were going to win and win big. She had been out clubbing with young people from Gen Z and they had told her how what they really wanted was not to be told how much pizza to eat.

Winning wasn’t about policy, it was about attitude. And no one was more go-getting than her. “We just have to look positive,” she concluded. “We need to embrace the modern world.” It would be a start if she was to embrace reality.