Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains – no matter how improbable – must be the truth. Which means that the only rational explanation for the current behaviour of the Tory party is that most of its members are out of their heads on psychotropic drugs. The Birmingham conference centre has been transformed into the country’s largest crack den, with the entire cabinet and the gobbiest MPs fighting over what’s left of their stash while competing to pass off their version of fantasy as reality.

We’ve already had the prime minister proposing we rerun the Festival of Britain to celebrate surviving Brexit. A Cliff Richard austerity singalong with everyone breathing a sigh of relief that they haven’t actually died. We’ve had Boris Johnson, a man who managed to waste £40m of public money failing to build a bridge across the Thames, going full psycho with a plan to build a bridge across the Irish Sea. Not to mention Jeremy Hunt in an advanced paranoid state claiming that we were in a gulag run by the EU.

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This wasn’t just a one-off, first-day collective meltdown, as every subsequent speaker appears to have taken all this as a benchmark of idiocy to which they should aspire.

First on the main stage on Monday was Dominic Raab. Such is the febrile atmosphere of this conference that every speech is being viewed as a potential leadership bid, so Theresa May should be grateful that the Brexit secretary went out of his way to rule himself out. Almost certainly completely unintentionally.

“The EU needs to get serious and do so now,” he demanded angrily. This didn’t get quite the reaction he had hoped. The hall may have had plenty of empty seats – anyone with a vestige of self-respect has long since run for the hills – but most of those who had chosen to endure the punishment beating just looked blank. No one wanted to be the person to tell Raab it had been the Tory government that had been taking the rise for the past two years and the EU had been deadly serious all along. He then went on to say he had nothing to offer but his blind optimism. No plan, just a wing and a prayer.

Chris Grayling is almost always a guaranteed source of stupidity, but even so his performance was still a collector’s item. After insisting the Heathrow decision had been a no-brainer – it had to have been, otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to make it – he declared that post-Brexit Britain would be exactly like Monarch airlines. Bankrupt with tens of thousands of people in need of repatriation. Sensing he now had the hall in the palm of his hands, he concluded by saying that his priority was to complete the improvement to slip-roads in Thurrock, presumably so that they can be used as a lorry park. Failing Grayling is an example to us all that you really can be hopeless and still end up in the cabinet.

It’s customary for the prime minister to be present for the chancellor’s speech. But as Philip Hammond wasn’t even present for his own gig, May clearly didn’t feel the need. Not for the first time, the Undertaker was completely out of step with his party. While the rest of them were mainlining amphetamines or taking psychedelics, Phil had stubbornly chosen to overdose on barbiturates. Every word was forced out. A struggle against unconsciousness. And not just because he had almost nothing to say. This was Phil as Philler. His final words were that the future laid with AI. You’d have thought the Tories had learned from their experiment with the Maybot.

There were equal amounts of inspired lunacy to be found on the fringes. At a lunchtime meeting of the Bruges Group, Priti Patel, Andrea Jenkyns and Owen Paterson – aka Dumb, Dumber and Dumbest: the three desperados fighting over a single brain cell – could be heard reprising their favourite stories about how everyone was trying to prevent the one true Brexit to a near hysterical audience. “We are the mainstream,” said Paterson. The day Paterson, the man who blamed badgers for not making themselves available to be culled in sufficient numbers, is mainstream is the day most people head for the exits.

To round off a hallucinatory day, we were treated to Jeremy Wright, the culture minister without a trace of charisma, trying to persuade the few dozen or so people still alive in the hall that he wasn’t a hologram and that he did really exist. Not even he appeared convinced.