A recent opinion poll put Change UK on 2%. What wasn’t so clear was whether that figure had been rounded up or down. Just five minutes before its major EU election rally in the Remain heartlands of Bath was about to start, there were still plenty of seats available in the cricket pavilion where it was being held. And there were only 32 chairs to start with. A few late stragglers helped fill the room, but the media still well outnumbered supporters.

Change UK is dying before it even learned to walk. Its MPs know it. Its candidates know it. The public knows it. Change UK never really wanted to change anything. What it wanted most of all was for things to stay the same. For the UK to remain in the EU and for the extremes of both the Tory and Labour parties to shut up and go away.

Now all it wants to change is its name. Change its clothes, its hair, its face. It wants to start again from scratch, to channel the goodwill it generated when its 11 MPs first left their parties and reposition itself as something more positive by forming a tactical alliance with the Lib Dems and Greens. Instead, it now just looks lost. Cut adrift by its own knives. Even its logo of four black lines looks like a subconscious attempt to write itself out of history.

Change UK was always doomed to failure, and Joan Ryan just showed why | Owen Jones Read more

The sound of pan pipes filled the room and a promo film started playing. On a side wall where almost no one could see it. A few seconds in, a circle of death appeared on the wall as the film buffered. Sometimes the metaphors write themselves. It was excruciating. Like intruding on a private grief. The embarrassment only being broken when Sarah Wollaston made a brief introduction and thanked everyone for coming. She might as well have gone round the room and done it in person to everyone. “We’re a very new party,” she said, trying to explain why almost no one was there. Try telling that to Nigel Farage’s Brexit party.

Next up was Change UK’s top candidate in the south-west, Rachel Johnson. She wisely chose to keep things lightish – God knows everyone needed a bit of cheering up – and started with a dig at Boris. “At least we’ve got a bus you can trust,” she began, before segueing into an anecdote about having two Agas. Like her brother, she understands her audience.

But even she couldn’t keep it up as the realities became unavoidable and she ended in gallows humour. Change UK were about as dysfunctional as her own family and the polls were so bad it was clear her political career was going to start in failure and that on Sunday week she was going to have, in her own words, her “arse handed to her on a plate by Ann Widdecombe”. To think, Johnson abandoned the Lib Dems on the grounds that they were absolutely useless. Change UK redefines the very meaning of hopeless. She’ll have to work hard to find a better lost cause.

No one can accuse Joan Ryan of indulging in personality politics. The former Labour MP is a charisma-free zone, a woman with the air of an over-anxious junior HR manager. The more she tries to encourage you, the worse you feel. She’d make a good living giving eulogies for people she’s never met at funeral services where no one has bothered to turn up. It was time someone stuck up for the EU, she said. She was right. Though I suspect everyone in Brussels rather wishes it wasn’t her.

“Look at your hands,” she concluded. Everyone briefly woke up, not quite sure they had heard her right. “Look at your hands,” she again demanded. Everyone rather awkwardly put their hands out in front of them and looked at them. Ryan was thrilled.

“There’s the answer,” she beamed. “The answer is in your hands.” Thank you and goodnight, grasshopper.

Throughout all this, Chuka Umunna had given the appearance of a man trying to pretend he wasn’t really there. He had looked disengaged – bored even – staring into the middle distance, as if lost in a private nightmare. Had he really abandoned his political career for this? Sure, he was being hounded out of his Streatham constituency by Momentum activists, but he’d wanted to crash and burn in a blaze of glory. Instead he was just drifting, unnoticed and unmissed, into oblivion. He did gather himself to make something approximating a passionate speech but his stardust wasn’t even really working on himself. Chuka, the patron saint of lost causes.

There were no questions at the end. Largely because the only ones worth asking were existential. Why were any of us here at this Change UK event? And not even Change UK had the answers. They are as bewildered by their absence of purpose as the rest of us. But at least they were there. Which is more than could be said of the Tories or Labour, who have more or less abandoned the country. And with the remain parties most interested in squabbling amongst themselves, the Brexit party is getting a free pass. Farage must be pissing himself.