The only available room in Birmingham last Tuesday night was an Airbnb on Edward Street. Usually the Birmingham tourist board are giving them away free, with incentivising jars of Bovril and vouchers for the legendary Hurst Street cafe Mr Egg. “Eat like a king for under a pound!”

But tonight, Birmingham was buzzing. There was a heavy police presence, and Ladypool Road had run out of balti, which I assumed was because I was the opening comedian for local blue-collar Beefheartian post-punk survivors the Nightingales at the Hare & Hounds in King’s Heath.

However, when I got into the room, I found I was overlooking the International Convention Centre, the home of the room-gobbling 2018 Conservative party conference. After last year’s standup stage-invasion debacle, I was surprised security checks had allowed a comedian like me within sight of the conference, and would like those responsible for this oversight to be spanked senseless in Josef K’s broom cupboard.

Perhaps I avoided being on the radar of security staff looking out for comedians because I am “about as funny as a bonfire in a burning orphanage. I thought comedy was sposed 2 b funny”, as you will doubtless say in the below-the-article comments online, Mr TrueBritExitEuropeKremlinbot19.

On Wednesday morning, staring over my laptop at the Conservative party conference venue, I assumed it would be easy to shit out Sunday’s thousand-word screed of liberal elite humour, but I was sick of the Tories, so I trawled the papers for other stories. Tuesday’s Independent newspaper headline “Planning glitch delays sex robot brothel”, a sentence in which almost every word suggests a story in its own right, seemed promising. But then I saw a photo of a sad-faced blond sex robot staring blankly out of the page, and I felt she had suffered enough ignominy without me adding to her woes.

I had the same feeling of mercy when I witnessed a mouse-faced Michael Gove eating wasabi peas alone in a Costa Coffee at Knutsford services last week, and quietly binned my latest Gove-mocking tract.

Then, that afternoon, in the van from Birmingham to Hackney’s fashionable Moth Club, Nightingales guitarist James Smith showed me a clip on his phone of Theresa May prancing uneasily to an Abba record, like a mantis with an inner ear infection.

Dead Cat strategies attempt to distract the public from some impending political disaster, but this was off the scale. Theresa May hadn’t so much thrown the dead cat on the table as slit it open, scooped out its guts, swallowed them whole, and worn its eviscerated feline body as some kind of hideous hat of gore.

Play Video 1:15 Theresa May dances on to the stage at the Tory party conference - video

Nonetheless, her idiotic Dead Cat Dance was received with loyal approval by the usual snap-on tools of democracy. James Cleverly, Conservative MP for Braintree, who despite having the word clever in his own name and the word brain in that of his constituency, found time to tweet, stupidly, “Great to see Theresa May dance on to the stage to Dancing Queen by ABBA. Classy.” This was something no one else anywhere in the world was thinking, as they watched, cringing with embarrassment, through their splayed fingers.

Meanwhile the Telegraph, a monochromatic shit-sheet which is given away free with water in WH Smiths, opined “Journalists gasped. Politicians burst into applause and laughter. Abba’s Dancing Queen played loud, and Theresa May shimmied her way to the podium.” Presumably I have spent my entire life misunderstanding the idea of shimmying. If I am ever hit by a car and have to crawl towards the edge of the road to die, trailing my guts behind me, I will be sure to think of myself as “shimmying” into the gutter.

And while her colleagues continue to nail Corbyn hard to the floor for his shortcomings, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg remains a friendly face that Theresa May visibly looks for in a difficult press conference, knowing she will throw her an easy question bone. Kuenssberg tweeted, “PM massive sense of humour alert – comes on to Dancing Queen, jigs about – hall loves it.” But I thought humor woz sposed 2 b funny.

If May’s ill-advised advisers were hoping to use her Dead Cat Dance as a distraction from the impossibility of reaching a satisfactory Brexit solution, they may have misjudged the situation. Mung-bean munching musicians hate it when Conservatives appropriate their work. Johnny Marr commanded David Cameron not to like the Smiths, and presumably must now have extended that embargo to For Britain poster boy Morrissey too.

Abba have already expressed concern about the abuse of their work for political ends, and threatened to sue the far-right anti-immigration Danish People’s party for appropriating Mamma Mia. Former Hep Star Björn Ulvaeus himself has described Brexit as “a disaster”, and as the Eurovision song contest’s most famous winners, Abba embody the spirit of pan-European cooperation that anti-immigration, anti-European Tories on the far right of the party seek to undermine.

Avatars of the 70s Keep Britain Tidy campaign, Abba were early adopters of the sort of environmental concerns that the Tories’ drive towards a deregulated post-Brexit Britain will abandon. And in featuring such arch historical rivals as a yellow-haired woman and a brown-haired woman, and a fat bearded man and a thin clean-shaven man, working in perfect harmony, Abba showed that different people could cooperate for the common good, rather than fight their fellows like horrid Brexit rats.

It’s highly likely that Theresa May’s Dead Cat Dance will end in Swedish pop anger, and the spin-wazzocks that talked her into it will soon distance themselves from their suggestion. There is no solution to the Conservatives’ impasse. Theresa’s Dead Cat Dance aimed to ensure that people talked about her moves, however humiliating, rather than her speech. And you fell for it. The Winner Takes It All would have been better walk-on music. “I’ve played all my cards, and that’s what you’ve done too / Nothing more to say / No more ace to play.”