Jeremy Hunt has stopped caring which side of history he is on, as long as he is the face of it

The foreign secretary wants you to believe he is serious about no-deal Brexit. He is not

If we may begin on a personal note, the wall-to-wall Glastonbury coverage over the weekend will not have rendered this particular mid-to-late-thirties political sketch writer alone in yearning for younger days. But little could I have known that nothing could transport one back with quite such terrifying potency as having to listen to Jeremy Hunt laying out his plan for no-deal Brexit, an event that could have easily taken place in the Worthy Farm chemical toilets compound at the peak of the morning rush.

An unmistakeable smell has punctuated this Tory leadership contest, but never before has the air been quite so thick with it.

Theresa May’s biggest mistake, according to various people who used to work for her and now write newspaper columns explaining why it absolutely definitely wasn’t their fault, was that she never showed the EU she was serious about no deal.

If you’re not serious about no deal, they think you’re not going to do it. If you’re not serious about placing your own country under economic sanctions, about destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and livelihoods, crashing your own economy, smashing your own property market, these idiots at the EU will just think you’re not serious about doing it.

That’s why we’re in the mess we’re in: because we didn’t do enough to convince the EU we really had gone completely mad. Which is disappointing, in its way, as we definitely have.

Anyway, the good news is, Jeremy Hunt’s not going to fall in to this trap. Jeremy Hunt is absolutely definitely deadly serious about no-deal Brexit, which is why he’s given a speech to explain just how serious he is.

Jeremy Hunt doesn’t want no-deal Brexit. Of course he doesn’t. But he is serious, or so he says, that if the EU doesn’t come up with a better deal by 30 September, then he will, in all seriousness, end the negotiations and get serious about no-deal Brexit.

It means that Jeremy Hunt’s serious plan, as outlined on Monday morning, with utmost seriousness, is to go to EU officials, in early September, when both he and they get back from their long summer holidays, and tell them: “OK. We need a new deal, and we’ve got three weeks to come up with it.”

The last deal took 17 months, and wasn’t good enough. But this time round, three weeks is going to be long enough. And why’s it going to be long enough? Because Jeremy Hunt says so, obviously. What more reassurance could you possibly need?

And if, for some curious reason, Jeremy Hunt doesn’t manage to get a new deal in three weeks, he’s got a lot of serious plans to put in place for no-deal Brexit.

He’s going to set up a “no-deal logistics committee” to work out how we can sort out the problem of food shortages in the event of no-deal Brexit, which is now four months away. He’s got £6bn to “provide support” for the farming and fishing sectors, who will not be able to cope with no deal. (The fishing aspect is particularly hilarious. Brexit itself is little more than a country self-immolating to please its fishermen and yet, here is Jeremy Hunt, almost accidentally acknowledging that if they get what they want, they’ll still need bailing out.)

He’s also going to find some money from somewhere, to carry on with the Brexiteers’ favourite fun project, which is dreaming up “technological” solutions to the Irish border question. Last time I checked, I believe Iain Duncan Smith had produced some kind of paper on self-driving cows.

This is money, of course, that doesn’t exist. The chancellor of the exchequer, Philip Hammond, has intervened today to point this out. Traditionally, in party leadership contests, candidates fight to secure the endorsement of leading party figures, but not this time. Boris Johnson has been told his plan for Brexit is a lie and legally impossible nonsense by the deputy prime minister, David Lidington, and the international trade secretary, Liam Fox. In the circumstances, Hunt may even be proud to have bagged such a high-profile denouncement.

It’s all mad, all of it. That’s the point, of course. But there’s a catch-22 here. The only way Jeremy Hunt can convince the EU he’s serious about no deal is if he can convince the bloc he’s actually gone mad. But if he’s trying to convince the EU he’s gone mad, he’s obviously not mad. Not least as he’s worked out that he’s standing in an election that will be decided by 160,000 highly reactionary pensioners, most of whom have themselves gone mad.

This is the leadership contest in a nutshell. A recent poll said that nearly half of the Tory party would be happy for Nigel Farage to be its leader. And so what we are witnessing is little more than a Nigel Farage impersonation contest.

At some point, it’s theoretically possible Jeremy Hunt will pause and catch his own reflection in the mirror and wonder what on earth he is doing. He wouldn’t even need to catch himself in the mirror. He could just watch his own appearance on The Andrew Marr Show on Sunday, where he bravely claimed that yes, he would look a business owner in the eye and, “with a heavy heart” tell them, sorry but your livelihood must be sacrificed upon the altar of Brexit.

“Become the change you want to see in the world,” Mahatma Gandhi supposedly once said. It is always a test worth applying to politicians, and especially Tory ones, for whom more often than not, it is extremely hard to work out what change it is they wish to see in the world, beyond their own personal elevation within it.

Hunt is now so committed to being the face of history he is past caring which side, or more accurately, end, he sticks himself on. Which would explain why, when his lips move, all the wrong stuff comes pouring out – a sensory experience which anyone who spent Monday morning crawling up the A303 past Stonehenge will be familiar with.