A journey to nowhere by Greg Hands, who makes a wasp at my window seem brave and brilliant

The chair of the Conservative Party likes to run into harm’s way at every opportunity – luckily, up until the next election, that’s his only job, writes Tom Peck

Put ’em up: Greg Hands, chairman of the Conservative Party, mounted a spirited defence of landmark by-election losses (PA)

I may have deployed this analogy more than once before but, on this occasion, as I type, there really and truly is a dying wasp flying up my window. It gets to the top, it stumbles to the bottom, it goes again. It will do this on loop because a wasp’s brain runs on instinct alone. It is born with all the intelligence it will ever have. It is biologically incapable of learning.

And, as I regard this wasp, on the other side of the room is the television, on which I am tracking the movements of Tory Party chair Greg Hands as he scuttles between the broadcast studios, explaining how, actually, these two most recent historic Tory by-election defeats are actually bad news for Keir Starmer. ITV. BBC Breakfast. Radio 4. Top. Bottom. Go again.

It’s especially unfortunate for Mr Hands as at least the wasp will have the dignity of death quite soon. Hands, meanwhile, has had to do this brave and brilliant journey to nowhere for what feels like at least once a month for the last year. And given that his party cannot seem to last more than few weeks without another one of its MPs having to step down in disgrace for one reason or another – and if the words “Madrid hotel room” mean anything to you, you’ll know there’s surely another one coming – he is still trapped in his own very public doom loop, albeit you would have to think, not for too much longer.

Hands is a hero, in his own way. SAS recruitment officers often talk of looking for the “one in 10”. Most soldiers, in the terrible heat of battle, revert to fear and self-preservation. It is only the rarest who actively hunt down the enemy. The defeated Tory candidate for Tamworth, Andrew Cooper, whose career will now mainly be remembered for a flowchart he posted on Facebook telling families who couldn’t feed their children to “f*** off”, turned out to be one of the normal folk. His dignified response to his own defeat was to sprint off stage at the very first opportunity, and to carry on sprinting away from the TV cameras and out through an exit door of a Tamworth leisure centre, never, we presume, to be seen again.

Hands, meanwhile, runs into harm’s way at absolutely every opportunity. The only difference is that when he gets there, he has an incredible knack of not returning fire but turning his own on himself, with answers that are even more embarrassing than the questions require. He is hardly even made to squirm. He does it by choice.

He really did sit there with a straight face and tell the BBC’s Naga Munchetty that, actually, in Tamworth, “the Labour vote is about 800 higher than it was four years ago, which is insignificant”. Maybe, Greg, maybe. But what surely makes it somewhat significant is the Tory vote being 20,000 lower than four years ago.

With both Chelsea and Fulham football clubs within his constituency of Kensington and Chelsea, Hands likes to claim, every so often, that he has outlasted more Premier League football managers than any MP in history. If he’s feeling generous, he may wish to share his unique brand of wisdom with them. Indeed, if he’d happened to have been managing the Brazil football team during their rather famous 7-1 World Cup semi-final defeat in 2014, he could simply have come out and said: “Well, actually, if you look at the game from the 89th minute onward, I think you’ll find we won.”

This sort of stuff tends to be the preserve of the still-loyal, true Corbyn believers who, six and a half years on, still think they actually won the 2017 election, not just by beating the Tories (which they didn’t) but by beating Tony Blair as well. Who knows, maybe Greg Hands will get to play Glastonbury?

Before that, though, he had a more urgent booking, this time with Sky News, whom he’d be telling: “There’s been a lot of, if you like, background circumstances in those two by-elections that have also made the job difficult for us.”

The trouble with “background circumstances” is that one man’s background is another man’s foreground. The first of these two by-elections was happening because the Tory MP had to resign for sexually assaulting someone. And the second one happened because the MP in question resigned in protest over the prime minister’s right to lie about it.

There’s just a lot going on in the “background”, isn’t there? In what Hands would later describe as “legacy issues”, there’s the sexual assault of a child, there’s watching tractor porn in the House of Commons, there’s corrupt lobbying activities, there’s brazenly lying to Parliament and being utterly found out. There’s crashing the economy. The list really does go on.

Hands’ main point, made many times over, was always the same. “I don’t see any enthusiasm for Labour,” he told both Times Radio, and the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, shortly before both made way for the sounds of loud cheering as Keir Starmer arrived in Mid Bedfordshire to celebrate victory.

Maybe he’s just blocked it out. You’d think having to humiliate himself upwards of a hundred times on live TV over the course of a year, and every time for the same reason – losing by-elections to Labour on jaw-droppingly big swings – would open his eyes to the fact that there could be a tiny bit of enthusiasm out there. Unless, of course, when the cameras aren’t pointed at him, he is secretly being mobbed everywhere he goes by the Tory-loving masses, all of whom, the moment the polling booths open, are sadly simultaneously washing their hair.

I took pity a couple of minutes ago. I couldn’t take it any more. Not on Greg Hands. He’s still going. But I’ve opened the window and the wasp is gone, he’s banking left over the lamppost at the end of the driveway and toward the copper beech tree. On current evidence, Mr Hands will have to wait a lot longer for his moment of sweet but ultimately futile liberation, quite possibly to the very last possible date in January 2025.