The room is booked, the camera tripods are assembled, the crowd of eager, political types – including a healthy smattering of aides, wannabes and reporters – are in place ready for the event to get under way. The appointed time ticks past, but that’s OK. Indeed, for a campaign event it’s almost a positive. It suggests the big speaker is late because he or she is in demand somewhere else, that the crowd at their previous stop just wouldn’t let go. It can build anticipation. A matter of days before an election, this is how it should be.

And make no mistake, this is a campaign event and an election is looming. Except, when Sajid Javid finally enters the hall in Westminster – the room rented from the Mothers’ Union by the Thatcherite Centre for Policy Studies – it soon becomes clear that the election in question is not the one for the European parliament on Thursday, which neither the home secretary nor the man who introduces him so much as mention.

Around 400 million European citizens are eligible to vote this week, but that’s not the contest on the minds of the people in this room. The one they’re all thinking about, and that hovers between the lines of Javid’s short speech, has a much smaller electorate: 313 Conservative MPs and an estimated 100,000 party members, each with a say in who will succeed Theresa May as Conservative leader and prime minister.

The contest will only gather more momentum as May’s exit becomes ever more imminent. Twenty-four hours before the European polls open, her cabinet colleagues will be measuring her political future in days.

'He desperately wants to hold it all together': Corbyn on the campaign trail Read more

Officially, Javid is here to launch a report on small business, a move that has roused a Westminster press corps always on the lookout for signs of a cabinet minister roaming beyond his or her brief.

And so when Javid opens with a tribute to Margaret Thatcher and then moves on to what Westminster folk call his backstory (“I’m sure all of you at some point will have heard me say that my dad was a bus driver …”), recalling how his father went on the buses solely so he might save enough money to start a small business – a market stall at first, selling women’s clothing – when Javid does all that, he’s assumed to be engaging in the same activity as the other Tories who’ve been doing magazine interviews recently, showing off their spouses or multiple ovens or, occasionally, both.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The home secretary, Sajid Javid, who spoke about his ‘backstory’ at the event in Westminster. Photograph: Mark Thomas/REX/Shutterstock

The assumption is that he, and they, are limbering up for the Tory leadership contest. That’s what the reporters present are here for, few of them interested in the finer points of Javid’s vision for small- or medium-sized enterprises.

The home secretary disappoints on that score, refusing to make the move Boris Johnson will make that same day and announce he’s running. He won’t even take questions. When the Guardian buttonholes him to ask what he’s doing in a Westminster ballroom rather than out on the campaign trail for an election less than a week away, he insists “I have been campaigning” and says he’s sure that’s true of his colleagues too.

When the Guardian replies that, as it happens, there has not been a single high-profile Conservative event for these elections, Javid is insistent: “Well, I’ve done some campaigning. I’ve been out, I’ve been out. And in Peterborough, we’re going out there soon as well.” Ah, but that’s a byelection for a seat in Westminster. That’s different. What about the European elections? “Two elections going on in Peterborough,” the home secretary says before he is ushered away.

Later a special adviser to Javid will clarify that he has not, in fact, done any campaigning for the European elections. But that hardly makes him unusual among the Tory top brass. On the contrary, none of them have done anything you’d recognise as fighting to get MEPs elected. Put simply, the Tory effort for Thursday’s contest has been the invisible campaign.

Even that description is too flattering, implying that activity is under way but we can’t see it. This is not a stealth campaign, one cunningly fought below the radar. The grimmer reality for the governing party of the United Kingdom is that its campaign for seats in the European parliament simply does not exist.

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Countless are the voters all over the country who say they’ve received fliers from the Brexit party, the Lib Dems, the Greens and Labour but nothing from the Conservative party (Scotland is an exception, where “Ruth Davidson’s Scottish Conservative team” have put one out). That’s strikingly the case in areas that are solidly Tory, from Devon to Wiltshire and from Amber Rudd’s East Sussex to Mark Francois’s Essex.

A Twitter callout establishes that a UK Conservative European election leaflet does exist, but hardly any voters have seen it. Not that it would be likely to rouse a mass stampede to the ballot box if they had. Its second paragraph begins: “How can these elections be stopped?”

And there, in a nutshell, is the explanation for this non-campaign. The Tories never wanted these elections to happen at all. It was one of the multiple Brexit promises May made that she ended up breaking. Just as she vowed over and over again that Britain would leave the EU on 29 March, so she was repeatedly clear that the UK would not take part in European elections on 23 May, and that it would be a disaster if it did. Clearly when that rarely spotted campaign leaflet was printed, the hope that the vote could be avoided still flickered. But here we are.

Play Video 1:28 May says she is not prepared to delay Brexit beyond 30 June – video

It’s hard to campaign full-throatedly for an election you promised to cancel, to a body you pledged to leave. And yet that is May’s plight. The result is that there has been no poster unveiling, no manifesto, no battle bus, no campaign speech. While Nigel Farage is out doing his rallies or getting milkshaked, while Jeremy Corbyn faces Andrew Marr, while Vince Cable awkwardly declares “bollocks to Brexit”, May has not done a single public event for these elections.

Which is not to say there has been no event at all. Last Friday, perhaps to make it impossible to say she had literally done nothing, the prime minister did do something, which the BBC dutifully reported as “campaigning in Bristol”. Billed as a “launch” – even though it was six days before polling day – May entered a holding room at Ashton Gate, the home of Bristol City football club, that contained no supporters or members of the public, but instead two TV camera operators, two photographers and a single Sky News reporter, whose work was to be “pooled” with the rest of the press. Flanked by the four Tory candidates for the south-west region, the PM read out a prepared statement and answered one question from the reporter.

To the undiscerning eye, it may have looked like a genuine campaign stop, though the optics were not great. As one seasoned Westminster hand quipped, May had opted for “the classic ‘victim’s family appeals for witnesses to come forward’ style of election campaign launch”. But regardless of how it looked, it was wholly bogus. It was the definition of a non-event.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest May speaking in Bristol ahead of the EU elections. Photograph: Toby Melville/PA

“No one wants to have anything to do with it,” was how one seasoned Tory operative put it to the Guardian at that Javid event. “Everyone knows it’s going to be a disaster.” For cabinet ministers to be seen campaigning is to reserve a future share of the blame. Better to keep your hands clean and prepare for the postmortem, albeit before the mortem has happened. Even with the polls showing the Tories in single figures and in fifth place, behind the Greens? “You take the hit and move on.”

“I think the whole party would rather not be fighting them – to be seen to do is such an embarrassing reminder of our betrayal of the Brexit campaigners [May] shamelessly pandered to,” texts a former minister. That’s the squeeze in a nutshell: Tory leavers cannot forgive May for betraying her Brexit promises; Tory remainers cannot forgive her for making them in the first place.

On Tuesday that squeeze got even tighter as May gave what may have been the opposite of a campaign speech, one almost designed to repel Tory voters. As she made one last pitch for her Brexit deal, she dangled the possibility of a second referendum – not emphatically enough to lure remainers, but clearly enough to push any wavering leavers into the arms of Nigel Farage’s Brexit party. And she did it less than 48 hours before the polls were due to open. The result is the Conservative party is on course for what will surely be the worst UK-wide electoral performance in its history.

Only in one place is there a hint of compassion for the outgoing prime minister. On a weekend visit to her Maidenhead constituency, there was plenty of admiration for her resilience, of course, and her dogged hard work, including as a local MP. Outside the local Conservative club, Alan Stiles, 52, a warehouse worker, said the person to blame was not May but David Cameron. “He’s the one who caused all this hassle.”

Hannah Bouckley, 40, a manager for a telecoms company, was similarly reluctant to speak ill of May. The PM was normally so visible; she’d visited Bouckley’s son’s school three times. And Bouckley could make no complaints about life in Maidenhead: “It’s the poor man’s Windsor,” she smiled. But this time May and her party had been invisible. “No leaflets, nothing at the station, nothing. I think they think we’re a dead cert – but we’re not.”

The Conservative party have spent this strange, unwanted campaign out of sight. But on Thursday that will end, and when the votes are tallied there will be no place to hide.