Monday

All party conferences feel as if they exist in their own inward-looking world, but this year’s Conservative bash was more dystopian than most. The main hall was an energy-free zone where speaker after speaker appeared to have been given instructions to be as mediocre as possible. The audience couldn’t even get animated when Priti Patel promised to crack down on criminals, something that is usually guaranteed to get members stamping their feet. Then again, with one Tory MP, Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, being slung out of the conference centre by police after holding a one-man siege of the international lounge moments before the home secretary’s speech, Boris Johnson facing an inquiry into alleged misuse of public funds during his friendship with Jennifer Arcuri, the government having been found to have acted unlawfully in regard to the recent prorogation and ministers actively working on ways to avoid complying with the Benn act, the Tories had to be careful about who they wanted to clamp down on. Outside the hall, the exhibition was most notable for a stand selling tinned fish – ideal for stockpiling – and one promoting the Cayman Islands as a holiday destination. Come for the tax avoidance, stay for the turtles. With almost no backbench MPs present – only lobbyists and the odd diehard member bother to turn up – the main goal of ministers was to get through the four days without putting their foot in it by letting on that they didn’t have a clue what the Brexit plan was or saying the wrong thing. Not all managed it. Having already had his headline announcement of 40 new hospitals knocked back to six partial refurbs, Matt Hancock, who never knowingly commits himself to a position that can’t be reversed, made the schoolboy error of saying he believed Charlotte Edwardes, the journalist who made the groping allegations against the prime minister. The health secretary looked desperate for days after. Still, the conference turned a tidy profit for the Tories, so job done with an election looming.

Tuesday

One bonus of being in Manchester for the Tory conference that I hadn’t anticipated was missing Spurs’ Champions League tie against Bayern Munich. Before the game, I had been gutted to have had to sell my ticket. After, not so much, though there has been a lot of disinformation about the result in the media. The 7-2 defeat wasn’t Tottenham’s worst result at home in Europe. That came in 1995 when we lost 8-0 to Cologne in the Intertoto Cup. Admittedly, we were then actively trying to get knocked out of the competition by fielding a team of 13-year-olds, but one must be accurate about these things and, under the circumstances, a five-goal thrashing was almost respectable. I later spoke to the friend who had gone to the game in my place and he was completely shellshocked. He described it as watching Bayern scoring the same goal over and over again while the Spurs defence just looked on. We’ve all seen games where Spurs are completely clueless and are incapable of making even the simplest pass, but this was the first time he had seen the team actually just give up. I had been hoping for so much more after Tottenham’s gutsy 2-1 win the previous week, in which they had come back from having a player sent off for two yellow cards in three minutes – so brainlessly Spurs – and the goalkeeper letting the ball trickle through his legs for the Southampton goal. Not that you would have known Spurs had been fighting a rearguard action from the highlights shown on the big screen at half-time. From watching those, you would have imagined Spurs were 2-0 up, had 11 men on the field and were in cruise control. It was revisionism worthy of a party conference. Next home game, I’m fully expecting to find Tottenham actually beat Bayern 2-0.

Wednesday

It’s almost as if the governing body of world athletics has a death wish. I’m sure all the right people got the relevant money, but holding the World Championships in 40-degree heat in Doha has been a miserable experience for athletes and TV viewers alike. Dina Asher-Smith and Katarina Johnson-Thompson should have been celebrating their gold medals in front of 60,000 people rather than a near-empty stadium where the media outnumbered the spectators. I could swear there were more people watching when my children used to compete in under-15 events for Herne Hill Harriers in south London. However, I couldn’t help but be impressed by Asher-Smith’s mother bribing her with Chanel handbags and computer games to persevere with athletics as a teenager. It put my efforts to shame. In a parallel world, I would have been another Steve Ovett – never Seb Coe, I was probably one of the few Britons willing him not to win – but lack of talent and a large quantity of drugs rather put paid to that dream. I did take up running more seriously in my 30s, taking part in 5k and 10k races, but by then it was all too late. So I was determined my kids were going to live the life I missed out on and forced them down to Tooting Bec athletics track every Tuesday and Thursday evening for training and to competitions at the weekend. This went on for several years, but was an unmitigated disaster even though they were both quite good. Both children hated it and Anna was the only athlete I knew who would invariably declare she had injured herself in the warm-ups.

Thursday

There are days when the only reasonable explanation for the behaviour of some MPs is that they have taken large quantities of hallucinogens to see what fantasy they can believe in now. This was one such day. In the House of Commons, Boris Johnson was presenting his new alternative to the Northern Ireland backstop – two borders rather than one, customs checks carried out by badgers in night-vision goggles, a de facto veto of any arrangement by the Democratic Unionist party and a system that guarantees all sides in Northern Ireland row about its future every four years, because that’s always worked out so well in the past – and Tory MPs were queueing up to award the prime minister a Nobel peace prize for his ingenuity. Though not quite all Tory MPs. Theresa May sat there impassive for the best part of an hour, her face a mixture of despair and disgust. Johnson’s plan was pretty much the alternative arrangements of the Brady amendment she had never bothered to present to the EU as they self-evidently failed to respect both the Good Friday agreement and the need for no customs checks. Predictably, everywhere outside the confines of the Conservative party, newly reunited with its European Research Group paramilitary wing, the DUP and a handful of Labour MPs desperate to vote for a deal – even a worse one than that which they had previously rejected – Johnson’s new proposal was politely, and not so politely, dismissed. We’ve reached the point where the only deal acceptable to the government and for which there is a majority in parliament is one that is dead on arrival.

Friday

Connor Spear, a 19-year-old with the nickname “Fun-time Frankie”, mislaid his car for a week, having forgotten where he parked it before a weekend festival in Bristol. He was only reunited with the vehicle after a man phoned to say he had been cycling past the car every day. I regret to say that my wife and I can rather improve on that. And we can’t even claim alcohol as an excuse. Several years ago, having not used the car for some days, I couldn’t remember where we had parked it. Having looked in all the normal places outside the front door, I did a search of the neighbouring streets. No joy. So I could only conclude it had been stolen, though why anyone would have wanted to nick a tatty 15-year-old Toyota Yaris rather escaped me. But I nonetheless reported the car stolen to the police and the insurance company and left it at that. Six weeks later, days before we were due to collect our £450 insurance payout, I got a phone call from the police. The car had been found just outside the local Budgens about half a mile from our house. My wife and I crept up the road to investigate and were horrified to discover there were no signs of the Yaris having been broken into or dumped. We could only conclude we must have stopped off at Budgens on the way home from somewhere, forgotten we had come by car after we had done our shopping, and walked home. Since then, we must both have walked past the car countless times without noticing. My subsequent phone call to the insurance company was one of the more embarrassing I have ever made.

Digested week, digested: the blame game begins

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Boris at his computer: ‘Quick recycle of my Telegraph columns, and I’ll knock this speech out in an hour.’ Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/AP