Journalist, novelist, Churchill biographer, politician, urban planner, diplomat. At this stage in Boris Johnson’s storied career we have to ask: is there anything he CAN do? Have a crack-eroo at being prime minister with Britain facing its greatest challenge in peacetime, seems to be the obvious answer after this radioactively dispiriting week in the Conservative leadership contest. Or “the good old days”, as we will be thinking of it in around six months.

One pantingly auto-parodic article in the Boris fanzine, the Daily Telegraph, decided the runaway favourite looked like “a prime minister in waiting”. So close, but not quite. Johnson looks like Chucky if he’d borrowed a suit for a court appearance, or a Yewtree version of Worzel Gummidge, or what would happen if you started making Margaret Rutherford out of papier-mache but got bored halfway through. This week amounted to watching the live abortion of that time-worn cliche that the Conservative parliamentary party is “the most sophisticated electorate in the world”. Do me a favour. They’ve just spaffed 114 first-round votes on a subclinical narcissist whose chief qualification for the gig is knowing the ancient Greek for raghead.

Still, other options were available. At a series of intimate Westminster gigs, prime ministerial hopefuls partied like it was 2016 and – with the exception of Rory Stewart – absolutely refused to tell the truth about the state we’re in and our options for getting out of it. I lost count of the times candidates began sentences with a lofty: “I represent …” Babe, I don’t know if you’ve noticed but we’re incredibly up against it here? NO ONE GIVES A TOSS ABOUT YOUR SPIRIT ANIMAL. At his launch, Matt Hancock was asked how he planned to deal with the serious threats posed by Silicon Valley. His reply? “I offer an emotionally charged platform to improve lives that is rooted, rooted in objective fact.”

Andrea Leadsom launching her campaign. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

I can’t believe that even as I was typing that paragraph, Hancock withdrew from the race. As for who else we’ve lost, it’s farewell to dishonesty’s Esther McVey, whose televised mugging-off by the tax avoider Lorraine Kelly serves as a reminder that late 90s GMTV was such a legendary snakepit that it is still destroying ambitions two decades later. Brexit’s Oxo mum, Andrea Leadsom, also failed to make the cut, as did unintriguing stranger “Mark Harper”, who claimed to have been chief whip under David Cameron, but has blown back out of town as mysteriously as he blew in, having failed to sell us his version of the monorail.

It was a week to make one begin seriously wondering after the political philosophy of Gen Sir Nick Carter, Britain’s chief of defence staff. Would a military coup really be so bad? Gotta wonder when even the remaining candidates are openly touting alternative solutions to parliamentary democracy as we know it.

Johnson, Britain’s id, has refused to rule out proroguing parliament to push through no deal. Shortly after the result of the first ballot, a defiant Stewart declared that if Johnson did take that path, then “we will hold our own session of parliament across the road in Methodist Central Hall and we will bring him down”.

Another absolutely normal day in our normal country. Perhaps it helps to see Stewart as a Charles de Gaulle figure, who – on the basis of not much more than a borrowed office in Carlton Gardens and a pretty high opinion of himself – spent a good chunk of the war acting the equal, if not superior, of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. As Julian Jackson remarks in his brilliant biography of the general: “Behaving like a great power was De Gaulle’s way of becoming one.”

If Stewart has a certain idea of Britain, it was exceedingly clear from his own campaign launch that Johnson does not. Or even any ideas. Despite starting at 11am, the event served breakfast, which feels about right as far as Johnson’s reputation for hard work goes. Short of putting the rogue in prorogue, his Brexit strategy seems to be to barge back to Brussels, unwisely essaying machismo. More on that game plan shortly.

Rory Stewart, like a great power. Photograph: Wayne Tippetts/REX/Shutterstock

Other launches? Michael Gove’s was just a mobile number you had to ring an hour before it started, then make your way to a field where he plied you with base speed, illegal repetitive beats, and ideas from middlebrow public intellectuals.

Meanwhile, many will still be confused by Sajid Javid. By day, he’s the charmless rich guy who enacts borderline racist Home Office policies and stands on the docks declaring national emergencies on the basis of the seaborne arrival of about 12 desperate migrants. By night, he’s the champion of underdogs who publicly laments not being asked to Donald Trump’s state banquet and strongly suggests this might be on the grounds of discrimination. I mean, what even is this character? A sort of equalities Bruce Wayne?

Either way, he is vastly more appealing than the thinly disguised men’s rights activist Dominic Raab, whose standout launch anecdote found him down his local boxing gym – where else? – where he’d met a “young lad” who turned his life … well, you know how all boxing gym stories go. The Raab story you aren’t going to find out about is the bullying accusation covered by a non-disclosure agreement, with Raab this week insisting: “The right time for the confidentiality obligations to be lifted on both sides for a fair and balanced airing of the dispute was before the court back in 2012.” Totally. THAT was the right time. The time when he is running to be actual prime minister is absolutely not the time, and I’m kind of disappointed people are asking.

Ultimately, though, all elections are psychosexual events for the Tories. Even mild-mannered Jeremy Hunt was looking at things in a way that might intrigue his analyst. Here’s the foreign secretary’s tweet on the day of the first ballot: “Woke up this morning and felt a bit like the morning of my wedding. Something big is going to change but don’t quite know how it will unfold.”

Ah. In retrospect, inviting Johnson to this metaphorical wedding was always going to end up one way. Honestly, you turn your back for one minute to pay the photographer and your wife’s … well, I hope you can both patch it up. I expect everyone had had a lot to drink.

As for Johnson, to listen to what passes for his plan is to be struck by a very profound sense that he is going to somehow shag our way out of this. Hand on heart, I do think pretending that politicians are credible sex objects should most swiftly disqualify you from voting. But to the likes of the “chemistry”-obsessed Telegraph, Johnson is the country’s romantic lead. They insist you see him as the Tory party’s Mr Darcy, emerging shirtless from a lake of shit to concede to having knocked up at least three of the Bennet sisters. (Of those, only silly Kitty went and kept it, of course, though he doesn’t feature in its life, having reluctantly parted with a small part of his £10,000 a year to make the matter go away.)

And so to his MP backers. Voting for Johnson in craven desperation to keep your seat doesn’t make you a beta; it makes you an omega. It is about as likely to be successful as the way England used to play football. Hoof it up to the big man. See if he can get something on it. In a crowded field of depressing statements this week, we might still single out the former international development secretary Andrew Mitchell’s justification for Johnson swerving the forthcoming TV debates: “There’s no reason for him to debate with everybody, I would have thought.”

I can think of a reason. But if you lacked reminders that the public at large is a mere plot device in the bigger story of Johnson’s careerism, then that “no reason” is it. The idea of public service has been so totally inverted by Johnson that it is the public doing the serving. Even people previously thought to be relatively sensible and intelligent Conservatives, such as Mitchell, see no reason to treat the populace with anything approaching respect.

So this is where we are at as we head into week two. Johnson’s courtiers are keeping him from his subjects like some porphyric king who they daren’t parade in public in case he speaks his mind or mounts the help. In his later years, Howard Hughes was guarded by a “Mormon mafia” who protected him from the public gaze and catered to his every whim. Occasionally, their overlord would desire to move on from whichever curtained hotel penthouse he’d been holed up in, and the logistics were quite something. Over the next month, then, let us imagine Johnson’s own political guards moving him covertly around London – down service stairwells and through back doors – his fingernails three inches long, his hair even more unkempt than usual. Only instead of dying at the end, as Hughes did, he becomes prime minister.