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A sobering realisation has dawned which summed up how far the Tories have walked away from sanity towards self-destruction.

Party grandee Sir Nicholas Soames declared that he felt so passionately about Boris Johnson’s unscrupulous power grab he was prepared to vote against his government and pay the price of deselection as an MP.

In other words, Johnson, the great Churchill wannabe who fancies himself as the true heir to the mightiest of Conservative legends, would be faced with telling Winston’s grandson he was booting him out of his Tory seat for defying his wishes.

Even though Soames became a Conservative MP at around the time Johnson left school. And Johnson is an unelected Downing Street squatter with a majority of none.

(Image: Reuters)

Had you told informed political observers a few years ago that such a scenario would unfold in 2019, they would have laughed in your face (actually they’d have done that as soon as they heard the words “Prime Minister” placed before Boris Johnson).

But the party that loves to refer to itself as “the longest-running and most successful in political history” is now so far removed from reality it cannot see how it is allowing itself to be ripped apart like the entrails of a fox during a Beaufort Hunt.

Former Chancellor Philip Hammond, who usually has the placid demeanour of a bereavement counsellor, said he and fellow MPs were “incensed” by Johnson’s aggressive tactics and “feel very strongly that now is the time we have to put the national interest ahead of any threats to us personally”.

Another former minister, the normally placid Justine Greening, said she’d had enough of Johnson’s “profoundly un-Conservative” no-deal policy and was walking before she could be pushed by vowing to stand down at the next election.

(Image: Getty)

Alistair Burt, Caroline Nokes and Antoinette Sandbach did the same, with the latter saying: “I feel so strongly about this that I’m prepared to put my job on the line for my constituents.”

And we learned they weren’t the only natural Tories whom Johnson has tried to shaft since he has been in power.

A document was released to an Edinburgh court which showed he gave the go-ahead on August 15 to suspend Parliament, two weeks before asking the monarch to allow him to prorogue it as a last resort. So he’s even conning the 93-year-old Queen.

But did we expect anything else from a proven liar, who is consumed with a belief he was born to rule and is willing to crush anyone and anything, including his nation’s best interests, to achieve it?

No. Especially now his strings are being pulled by a clearly unhinged master of the dark arts, his chief of staff Dominic Cummings, whom David Cameron once called a “career psychopath”.

Sadly this country is being run by the least principled and least talented Tory government ever. But Johnson is not the sole cause of his party’s horror show. He has just strolled on to the set with a gimp mask and a blood-drenched machete 10 minutes before the final credits.

He is merely the grimmest ghoul at the finale of the ghost train ride who is driving it on to the rocks.

To find out who is the real author of its demise go back to 2013 when Cameron unveiled his plan to escape from a coalition government by promising a “simple referendum on membership of the EU”.

He was sick of having bleeding-heart Liberals in his Cabinet and decided the only way to get a proper majority was to see off the threat from UKIP, by getting into bed with Nigel Farage’s isolationist dream, and wooing back lost Tory voters.

Like Johnson now, Cameron’s unshakeable belief that his charm would win the day was fired by the same Old Etonian sense of entitlement. The core belief that you have powers to bend lesser mortals to your will.

Cameron talked up the offer of Brexit as a magical potion that would cure the Europhobic illness that had split the party for decades. But it was a poisonous concoction too many of his MPs got wildly drunk on. A drunkenness that liberated the worst backward-looking, xenophobic Tory traits.

The “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists” Cameron had called UKIP politicians came into the mainstream of the Tory Party.

Suddenly, a motley collection of swivel-eyed, Euro-hating, Addams Family rejects who cynically went under the objective-sounding title of the European Research Group were all over our screens spouting their vision of returning us to some mythical Little England paradise where blue passports were waved at Wembley and Land of Hope and Glory was sung at every school assembly.

Intellectual pygmies like Mark Francois and David Davis, former part-time TA men, passed themselves off as war heroes.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, previously an anachronistic joke, became a heavyweight thinker, telling us Britons would throw off their chains and reside in the sunlit uplands we use to inhabit before mass immigration and welfarism.

Which appealed to their overwhelmingly ageing, white, reactionary members, and drew support from disillusioned Labour voters of similar mindset.

Meanwhile, Britain’s international standing plummeted in line with the pound.

Still, as the final battle in a Tory civil war looms, and reputations lie in tatters on the battlefield, you’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.

The party which prided itself on being the most successful in the history of the free world, looks very small, very split and very broken. It couldn’t happen to a nicer shower.

It’s just a shame that we let that shower rain on all of our parades.