“What a non-story. ‘Couple have row’.” So tweeted security minister Ben Wallace, Boris Johnson’s 2016 campaign manager. But it appears he thought better of it and deleted that tweet when even every ardent Johnson-backing paper splashed the story of the midnight row between Johnson and his girlfriend. The Mail blazons Carrie Symonds’ cries in red, “Get off me … get out of my flat.”

Should the police have been called? Go out with them of an evening, as I did the other day, and they assiduously attend all reports of rows when neighbours hear shouts, screams, crashing crockery and and other indications that a situation may seem to have turned toxic.

The argument between Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds appears to have crossed that threshold, in the minds of those who heard it reverberating through their walls and floors. The Times reports a nursery teacher on the top floor among those alarmed: “It went on for about 10 minutes. I’ve never heard anything like it. I could hear shouting and screaming from a lady, she sounded really angry. I was considering calling the police but then a [police] van and car came.” The neighbours had decided to sound the alarm.

That cavalier posh-boy spoiled behaviour should truly upset law abiding Tory party members

Can’t Johnson keep out of the headlines even on the very night of his triumph in reaching the last stage of the Tory leadership contest? And the fact that he can’t leads one to recall a track record of erratic behaviour: the affairs, the untruths, the subterfuges, the sackings for lying. The question of Boris Johnson’s character – the way he does things and who he seems to be – is now of first order importance for the future of Britain. When Carrie Symonds is reported to be railing at him for ruining her sofa with red wine, shouting “You don’t just care for anything because you’re spoilt. You have no care for money or anything” she lands a direct hit on everything about him that should give Tory members, and the rest of us, pause for thought: the sense of entitlement, the privilege and the fecklessness. The public will have been struck by the revelation he earned £700,000 outside his parliamentary salary in less than a year: people don’t like politics to pay that well.

Consider as well this small vignette: Johnson’s Toyota Previa people carrier had been parked outside Symonds’s flat overnight but was reportedly driven away Friday afternoon. It had three parking tickets and a mocking flyer on the windscreen that had also been posted on a fence nearby reading : “We’d rather endure him as a neighbour than our prime minister.” Another neighbour was reported as saying: “It’s got loads of parking tickets on it. He just leaves it here. He doesn’t care.” That’s the attitude: parking tickets are for little people. That cavalier posh-boy spoiled behaviour should truly upset law abiding Tory party members.

Today in Birmingham Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt face thousands of Tory members in the first of 16 hustings. Some brave souls may raise character questions, but no doubt Jeremy Hunt will be dignified to a fault, avoiding any comment. It’s odds on that an overwhelming majority of Tory party members, in the grip of no-deal mania, will be whooping it up for their man. This week’s astonishing YouGov poll showed two thirds of them willing to sacrifice absolutely everything and all of us just to get the Brexit phantasm of their wild imaginings. Sod the union, sod Scotland and Ireland, sod the Tory party itself, and sod the economy on which they are willing to impose “significant damage”. This is fanaticism; many of those polled would be happy with the idea of Nigel Farage leading them.

But out there in the country today’s headlines may do him damage. In fact, this may be just one more scene in the extraordinary implosion of the Conservative Party. The Tories’ sorrows come not as single spies but in battalions: Mark Field’s ludicrously aggressive treatment of a peaceful female protester was a shocker. The local Brecon and Radnor party are re-selecting their disgraced MP Chris Davies (convicted for expenses fraud) to fight a by-election the Liberal Democrats look well able to seize. Worst of all, Richard Ratcliffe is on hunger strike, still trying to get the release of his wife from an Iranian jail. And that goes back of course to Boris Johnson’s blunder, which he has done so little to redress.

This looks a party in freefall, in the midst of a national crisis entirely of their own making. The election of a character as erratic as Johnson, a truly loose cannon, could accelerate and seal its demise.