Will the last one out of the Tory party please turn off the Maybot

According to rumour, no fewer than 20 Tory MPS would fancy their chances in a leadership contest. They’d better get a move on because if they don’t, there might not be a Tory party left to lead.

Yesterday, the Thatcherites and

Brexit purists of the Bruges Group held a meeting in Westminster, and anarchy was in the air. Every mention of Theresa May was met with jeers. “Traitor!” howled one attendee. “Kick her out!” bawled another. “She’s a European!” roared a third.

Addressing the meeting were three Tory MPS who have called for Mrs May to go: Mark Francois (Rayleigh & Wickford); Andrew Bridgen (NW Leics); and Anne Marie Morris (Newton Abbot). Mr Bridgen – a squat, perpetually glaring backbencher who vaguely resembles a bulldog attempting to solve a 12-piece jigsaw – declared that “the Maybot has gone haywire, and no one can find the off switch”. He had, he revealed, instructed his staff to publish this remark on Twitter the day before, but for some reason they didn’t seem to have got around to it.

For her part, Ms Morris – who was briefly suspended by the Tories in 2017 for using the phrase “n----- in the woodpile” at a public meeting – suggested that, at the European elections, she would consider voting for Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party (“I would need to see who the candidates were”). Traditionally, MPS have tended to vote for the parties of which they are members, but perhaps this is just another outmoded convention that Brexit will sweep away.

The day’s headline act, however, was Mr Francois – who has surely now eclipsed Jacob Rees-mogg as the breakout star of Brexit. Three months ago, few people outside – and possibly even inside – Mr Francois’s immediate family had ever heard of him. Yet today, he’s barely off our TV screens, whether boasting about his exploits in the Territorial Army (“I wasn’t trained to lose”) or bellowing analogies about the Second World War.

In January, for example, the German boss of Airbus suggested that a no-deal Brexit might be less than ideal for his business. “My father, Reginald Francois, was a D-day veteran,” growled Mr Francois on the BBC. “He never submitted to bullying by any German – and neither will his son.”

Naturally, his audience at the Bruges Group loved him. They loved his pledge to fight Mrs May’s Brexit deal all the way (“The Spartan phalanx

‘If you try to hold us in against our will, you will face perfidious Albion on speed!’

remains intact!”). They loved his vow to destroy the EU from within (“If you try to hold us in against our will, you will face perfidious Albion on speed!”).

And they loved, in particular, his decision to close his speech with a reading from Tennyson’s Ulysses: a poem, quivered Mr Francois with great feeling, which “could almost have been written for our current situation”.

Yesterday, Mrs May wasn’t in Westminster. In fact, she was out of the country altogether.

Probably for the best.