Gavin Williamson is so desperate to be prime minister that he’s done a kiss-and-tell on a Scarborough fireplace saleswoman. Stay classy, secretary of state! It helps to consider the Tories as not simply the natural party of government, but also the natural party of dignity. You should particularly admire the way that Gavin tried to distract us from his kiss-and-tell in the Mail by informing the Telegraph the Russians are ready to “kill thousands and thousands and thousands” of Britons with a crippling attack on the UK’s energy supply.

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So what if your nerves end up as collateral damage in Williamson’s frantic bid to stop you picturing him sweeping the ornaments off one of the display fireplaces, then lifting a showroom colleague on to its marble-effect mantel? So what if your peace of mind has been shattered by Gavin’s convenient suggestion that the reds aren’t under your bed, but in your boiler cupboard? That’s politics, baby. The defence secretary is pressing your override button.

You need to understand that the Russians are going to kill you and your family if you don’t stop imagining this possibly chimneypiece-based “shared kiss”. Stop it now. Stop wondering if he used one of the more modern fireplaces, or whether it was a model from a heritage range called something like The Westminster. It’s like Gavin says – and I can’t believe this is a genuine quote from a serving human, let alone a serving secretary of state: “I no longer sell fireplaces and have built a career in politics.” You hear that? He is OUT of the surrounds game. He’s gone straight – don’t you ever try to pull him back into that world. If it falls to him to assume the mantel one day, that’s no longer going to mean what it did back in Scarborough.

Anyhoo … elsewhere in the natural party of dignity, things could be going less humiliatingly for David Cameron, who this week was caught on camera at Davos being momentarily tolerated by Lakshmi Mittal. As Simba has to learn, the circle of life can be very bleak.

How bleak? Put it this way: Cameron’s World Economic Forum lurking saw him derided at length as a “ghost of remainers past” – by Henry Bolton. That’s right. Holed up in his Folkestone hotel, in the very middle of a siege of high-profile resignations best described as Ukip’s Waco, and without even a 25-year-old racist soulmate for company, the Ukip leader compared himself with David Cameron and thought: hey, it could be worse. At least I’m not that guy.

Play Video 0:23 Brexit is ‘a mistake, not a disaster’, says David Cameron in Davos – video

As for that guy, the Davos clip is an exquisitely excruciating study in the fallen mighty. To watch it is to behold Mittal becoming so palpably bored within four seconds that he’s getting ready to wander off even as he taunts Cameron with the comically passive-aggressive mention of Brexit. “How are you going?” the UK’s fourth-richest man asks the former prime minister perfunctorily. “Good, actually,” Cameron tries to breeze unconvincingly, “I’m busy, doing a book, and I’m doing this fund with China which is interesting …” Not remotely to Mittal, who cuts in wickedly: “Everybody’s talking about Brexit.” “Yes, well, I know. It’s frustrating …” deflects Cameron nervously. “As I keep saying, it’s a mistake, not a disaster.”

Oh, mate. Absolutely dying for Cameron’s book, which I can only picture as a hilarious counterfactual that tries to tell the story of the past few years as if he weren’t the worst British prime minister in modern history. It’s quite an interesting writing exercise, really – up there with trying to create a narrative where the Axis powers defeated Britain in the second world war, or where Kennedy wasn’t shot.

At some level, May’s speeches are judged a success if the chancellor doesn’t have to storm the stage with a Strepsil

To Davos, then – the other sort of Presidents Club – where the UK has been horribly humiliated. I don’t want to sound like some unreconstructed City sex case, but what were we expecting? No one’s more excited than me about the vague promise of trading bigly with a raging protectionist, but pinning hopes on Theresa May’s Trump bilateral feels faintly naive.

At some level, of course, May’s speeches are judged a success if the chancellor doesn’t have to storm the stage with a Strepsil, and bits of the scenery don’t drop off to go and listen to someone more important. But it has not gone unnoticed that the prime minister’s Davos speech was as sparsely attended as her one to the United Nations last September. Perhaps, as Spinal Tap’s manager might have it, her appeal is becoming more selective. Yet Davos man is said to have been turned off by her decision to make a speech about internet security as opposed to addressing Brexit. It seems to have been one of those rare gigs where an audience really did want to hear the new stuff. “Britain’s stature on the world stage has diminished,” judged the New York Times. “The former colonial empire has been reduced to a lesser actor.” And after we’d stayed in character for so long.

Speaking of staying in character, there was further trouble for May back home in the shape of Jacob Rees-Mogg (who has been pretending not to be middle class since at least 1984). Newly elected as chair of the influential European research group of hard-Brexit Tories, Rees-Mogg has had another look at the Rorschach blot of the referendum vote, and announced ominously: “The British people … did not vote for the management of decline. They voted for hope and opportunity and politicians must now deliver it.”

But will they? Even before Moggy’s Brexit ultras chuck us out of the frying pan and into the fireplace, this government has shown itself incapable of delivering anything other than a rolling cycle of directionless elite indignity. Perhaps we are condemned to watch it for the foreseeable future. But would it really kill the Russians to give us all a break and take out at least the TV signal?

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist