I should state right now that I, like Michael Gove, deeply regret the decisions I took. I was a young journalist at the time. It was a mistake. I look back and think I wish I hadn’t done that.

I speak, of course, of the profoundly dangerous, mind-altering decision I took to become a political sketch writer. Because I’ve just spent a full day with my nose pressed right into the glass of the Tory leadership contest, or TLC, as it’s known on the streets, and I’ll level with you: I’m absolutely off my tits.

Was any of it real? Have I really eaten an official, Matt Hancock-branded caramel waffle? The wrapper’s in my hand right now so the evidence is overwhelming. I’m told I was in a room with Esther McVey at one point, standing next to a tiny framed picture of Margaret Thatcher, when a rather large member of the public rushed the stage to scream his lungs out about “Brexit betrayal”.

But something in the back of my mind is telling me Lorraine Kelly’s involved in that somehow. Surely not?

And I’m pretty sure I was sitting only about 15 feet from Dominic Raab, when he started talking about having a Union Jack sewn into his shorts when he was three years old. Again, I’ve got the transcript. I’ve rewatched the clip. It’s looking increasingly likely that that really happened as well.

I’ve heard Jeremy Hunt say that without Brexit there will be no Conservative Party, and that’s why he should be leader of it. To be honest, that stuff is about my level. I can handle that. Hunt is the super strength skunk candidate of the Tory leadership contest. You know, the slow burn, the more gently degenerative psychosis-inducing stuff. We’ve all been bang on that for years now.

In say, 2016, it would have been seen as quite mad for an EU-loving Tory, who knows beyond all doubt that Brexit is an absolutely terrible idea, to stand up and say, ”We must do Brexit and I’m the man to do it.” But this is the stuff that makes you the sanity candidate.

Oh yeah, and there was Michael Gove, launching a leadership bid that was absolutely doomed to fail before it began. There he was, talking with studied emotion about his adopted parents, about how his mother told him, “You didn’t grow under my heart, you grew in it.”

But by this point I was so far gone I couldn’t tell you if it was happening right in front of me, or if I’d just had so much TLC now I’d woken up in July 2016 with absolutely no idea how I got there. Which was the last time I was sitting in a room with Michael Gove, he who has absolutely no desire whatsoever to stand to be prime minister, listening to the very same words, launching a leadership bid that was doomed to fail before it began.

Did I hear Matt Hancock saying he was going to sort out the excesses of Silicon Valley using “an emotionally charged platform”?

Did I really listen to Dominic Raab saying he was “sick of seeing Britain laid low like this”. Sick of his life’s work? Sick of Brexit having broken his country, and sick with himself for having done it?

No word from Raab, by the way, on whether he’d ever taken mind-altering substances. Still, the substances would have to find it first.

This is the problem with TLC, it’s the gateway drug to the actual Tory government. It seems like a laugh at first. Your mates are all doing it. But then, what do you know? You don’t even know what year it is, you’re an international laughing stock, it’s ruined your life but you keep going back for more.

It’d be easy to laugh, if we weren’t all so deeply in the grip of it. The only person who is laughing, by the way, is Boris Johnson. So laughably and consistently absurd has the show become that is has lowered itself even to beneath his level. The pasture is his for the taking. All that can stop him now is own cavernous gob. Which explains why he hasn’t even launched his campaign at all. That’s how you become prime minister now. No election, no campaign, not even a speech.