We might need to live on a new planet – luckily the Tories are already there

You really don’t get to ignore reality forever and, though they’ve forgotten, it’s absolutely horrific down here

Now it’s become certain that humanity’s only hope for survival is to colonise a new planet, the good news is that the Conservative Party is clearly already living on it.

If you gaze hard enough into that picture from the James Webb telescope, you might even be able to spot Rishi Sunak, somewhere just past Andromeda, slipping out of his intergalactic travel wear and into one of a reassuringly wide selection of cashmere hoodies.

And it sounds like a nice place as well. So nice that, unsurprisingly, they’ve immediately descended into their now traditional s***fight over who gets to be in charge.

And who can blame them? This new gaff is the absolute nuts. There’s clearly an abundance of cheap energy (otherwise someone would have mentioned it). No one’s even the tiniest bit worried about how they’re going to heat their homes, or buy their food or fill their car.

And they must have already established a fully functioning health, welfare and social care system, or else they wouldn’t have the mountains of spare cash left over to promise to cut taxes for everyone.

But it’s not all wine and roses up there. They’re still having a lot of difficulty finding a crisp, 10-word definition of a woman, to the point where it’s almost reaching physical violence. But that shouldn’t worry anyone. If there really is a planet on which that’s the main thing to get angry about, then take me to the spaceship immediately.

Kemi Badenoch’s also not finding it easy. When she launched her campaign she got one of her team to stick two Post-it notes on the toilet doors, saying “Men” and “Ladies”. This was, at first, thought to be evidence of her descent into full pencils-up-the-nostrils culture war madness. But there is surely a more benign explanation. Maybe she just can’t tell these tentacled people apart. It would certainly make more sense.

There’s other bad news. This will come as a shock to no one, but the European Court of Human Rights has somehow stretched its overreaching tentacles into our wondrous new jurisdiction. But Suella Braverman’s going to put a stop to that. That, again, is a really big deal there. People must really, really care about that, or else why would someone trying to become the actual prime minister keep going on about that? There can’t be any actual, real, problems at all.

And there are a few other alarm bells ringing. Liz Truss won’t stop going on about her “track record of delivery”. It’s quite a bold boast, that, especially when everything’s got so bad that you’ve had to go and live on another planet. But even back on Earth, people are starting to wonder. It’s not just that they’re not sure that they’re aware of anything that she’s actually delivered. And it’s not only that her “track record of delivery” includes intimate, high-level involvement in the single biggest cock-up in British political history – namely taking the country out of the EU by accident.

Rishi Sunak wants everyone to know that they’re “Ready for Rishi.” Rather than, as anyone hallway normal would put it, Rishi is ready for them. Look, maybe it makes sense up there. Celestial forces work in curious ways and maybe the moment Rishi set his first three hundred quid flip-flop down upon this brave new world, the full force of his 5 ft 6in frame upset its delicate balance so much that its sun and moon and stars all instantly began to revolve around him. And all he had to do was announce, “you are ready for me now”, and the universe obliged.

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Rishi’s campaign, as it happens, seems to have hit the skids. Still, it must be hard trying to do all that by day, while also having to sail new uncharted oceans, looking for somewhere offshore to sequester the family wealth.

Mainly, whoever lives up there has taken a real shine to Penny Mordaunt. No one’s entirely clear why, other than that she’s largely considered to have had the least to do with the neverending chaos tornado that brought them here to begin with.

She also reckons she’s the one that “Labour fears most”. But there is a slight problem with that. Labour are still on planet Earth. They still haven’t been through the necessary complete detachment that would be required to take any of this total insanity seriously.

And there is a nasty twist in all this. No one’s told them yet but at some point, one of them’s actually going to win. And then they all have to get into the spaceship and come home. You really don’t get to ignore reality forever. And, though they’ve forgotten, it’s absolutely horrific down here, and it really doesn’t look like anyone’s going to forgive their little family of space cadet leaders for rushing off to the Planet Zog when they needed them more than ever.