We really are living on Fantasy Island...

IT doesn’t happen often, but sometimes the great historymaking machine we call life swirls into a kind of Sargasso Sea of craziness which causes us mere mortals to believe the lunatics have at last taken over the asylum.

It’s a weird patch of ocean we’ve entered – one built on nothing but flotsam and jetsam – a floating, shifting jungle of groundless seaweed filled with slippery eels hatching future generations of writhing plot and intrigue.

Yep… that’s Westminster today folks. Or, to metamorphose the metaphor into one with feathers – it’s a cuckoo’s-nest the rest of the world is watching with awe, like laughing twitchers who’ve travelled to some Scillonian Isle to ogle at the antics of a small doomed bird which has badly lost its way.

As mentioned a week ago, there’s little point in writing a newspaper column until the very last minute nowadays – you only have to blink and the history books are rewritten. I set out on a car journey from Cornwall to Exmoor on Thursday and in the three hours it took to get home we lost another prime minister and the nation sank into further chaos.

As we began the long 1,400ft descent from the Brendon Hills down into West Somerset, a local Exmoor man was being mentioned on the car radio as the main guy in the running for Number 10. Namely: the self-seeking mop-headed missile who was so recently booted out of that very address by the very people who are now muttering about rehanging the posh wallpaper and calling back his removal vans.

In what used to be called the “normal world”, such a thing would have been regarded insane. No serious political party throughout most of my lifetime would have dared kickout a leader for serial wrongdoings in summer, only to welcome him back a couple of months later as the leaves were beginning to fall.

It would be like saying: “Yes, some might think we’re so riddled with U-turns, we can’t even decide upon a leader. Yes, when we said we were right to make him go, we were wrong. But please do not question our integrity now when we say we’re right to have him back after wrongly choosing the wrong interim leader. Because in our special populist world of magic and mirrors, a whole load of wrongs really can make a right.”

It’s bonkers, and most sane people know it. Except the concept of sanity is no longer a benchmark for anything, let alone the job of leading the country. Nor, it seems, are concepts of integrity and honesty.

For example, it is now generally agreed that the infamous £350 million painted on the side of the Brexit bus – which implied the UK could save the amount by leaving the EU and plough every penny of it, week by week, into the NHS – was a falsehood. The actual reality was that UK payments were more like £250m a week, funds which have now been drowned in a tide of lost trade anyway. But the blustering implication that the sum would each week find its way clearly and directly into NHS coffers is now laughable. While he was prime minister, Johnson never even attempted to cook the books to make the symbol of “taking back” control a reality.

Yet we live in such a world of fantasy nowadays, none of this stuff seems to matter. I saw a vox-pop on the BBC following the Truss resignation in which one man even said he had a vision of Boris, “riding down Whitehall” on his “white charger” to “save the day.”

I thought he was having a laugh, but he was serious. And I can’t even begin to describe how incredulous that made me feel. I know I keep banging on about how I knew Boris when he was a kid, but I am telling you that if this guy was confronted with a white charger it’s unlikely he’d be able to mount the damn thing, let alone face the right way once up there in the saddle.

There’s another fantasy doing the rounds. It’s one of those crazy conspiracy theories and it claims the

The rest of the world watches like laughing twitchers on some Scillonian isle, ogling the antics of a small doomed bird which has badly lost its way

whole Truss thing was invented by Boris supporters who knew she’d be such a dead-duck there’d be a massive call for his return once she’d messed up. Given her rapid, absolute and breathtaking failure in the job, you can see the logic – until you quickly remember that most conspiracy theories are bonkers. Surely it would not be possible to rig a Conservative party vote? Um… or you would think that, until the online magazine Tortoise enrolled a pet tortoise named Archie, two foreign nationals, and a past prime minister (under her maiden name Margaret Roberts) as Tory members and therefore as credible voters in a leadership election.

As I say, not even a cynic like me could believe in such a fantasy. But I tell you what I do believe in… decency, honesty, clarity and, above everything else right now, stability. For the moment I don’t care who delivers it – Rishi, Jeremy, Kier, whoever… just prevent our once great ship from sailing onto the rocks which undoubtedly lie beyond the weird and unsettling bit of ocean we’re passing through.